Ubuntu – How to split an ODS spreadsheet file into csv files per sheet on the terminal

command linecsvlibreofficexls

I would like to split a spreadsheet (ods or xlsx) into multiple csv files, one for each sheet in the spreadsheet.

I would like to do this without launching a graphical app and preferably in a one liner.

Any ideas?

Though the linked duplicate provides a possible solution in one of the answers (not in the accepted one) and was helpful. The solution does not work with ODS files as I requested, and I consider the question to be sufficiently different.

Best Answer

Well, libreoffice can convert documents from a script (i.e. in headless mode without opening a GUI). To convert any spreadsheet format to CSV, its simplest form would look like e.g.

libreoffice --convert-to csv PATH/TO/YOUR.ODS

However, this just takes the first sheet of your document and converts that, ignoring all others. It also lacks an option to select the sheet to convert, sadly.

So we're going to need an external tool, like xlsx2csv. It's an open source Python (both 2 and 3) script that converts XLSX files to CSV, and supports extracting all sheets into separate files.

Ubuntu already comes with Python installed, but maybe you need to install pip first, its package manager. I'm going for Python 3, but you could change all commands below to run it with 2 as well:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Then you can install xlsx2csv with pip3 into your user's package directory, using

pip3 install --user xlsx2csv

After that, the executable script can be found in ~/.local/bin/xlsx2csv.

Now if you don't have it in XLSX format already, let's convert that ODS spreadsheet with libreoffice:

libreoffice --convert-to xlsx PATH/TO/YOUR.ods

Then we use xlsx2csv to extract all sheets. It will create a folder OUTPUTFOLDER and place all extracted SHEETNAME.csv in there:

~/.local/bin/xlsx2csv -a YOUR.xlsx OUTPUTFOLDER
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