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Comment by loevborg | Hacker News Reader

csvkit is excellent. I like `csvlook` for display csv files in the terminal.

Can anyone recommend an easy way to convert csv to xls on Linux? I know that libreoffice and gnumeric can do it in headless mode, but it seems terrible overkill.

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It is mega overkill but Pentaho does conversion between a long list of file and database formats. I'm more mentioning it so you can check it out in case you ever see a more complex requirement, or want to learn the tool. Once I learned it the one off stuff is trivial. It takes me 5-10 mins to import an xls, let the tool examine the file for field names and types, hook that to a table load step, generate the ddl, edit the ddl to remove spaces from field names and then execute the ddl followed by the loader job.

Since you're going flat file to flat file it would be faster for you as no field name edits are required. You just create a csv input step, xls output step and that's it, save and run the transformation and you're done.

A good way to find those kinds of conversion tools is to search using the x2y pattern. For example, searching "csv2xls" returns:

https://github.com/ferkulat/csv2xls

https://github.com/alexprengere/csv2xls

http://www.bitools.eu/csv2xls/

As others have mentioned, you can find variations of this around online, but if you wish to roll you own (perhaps to add other features or what have you), you could knock it out in about 20 lines of Python using the built in CSV library and Openpyxl [1].

[1] https://openpyxl.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

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