First of all, I know the standard way - the way I've been doing it for
decades - which is to:
1) From Excel, write it out as a text file (tab delimited).
2) Work on it in Linux, using, e.g., AWK, creating a new tab-delimited file.
3) Load the tab-delimited file back into Excel
This, of course, works fine, but is tedious and not really automate-able;
you still have lots of manual steps.
What I'm looking for is something that can actually read/write Excel's
native format - i.e., an XLS file. Note that, for the purposes of this discussion, we are only talking about XLS (the old, classic Excel format),
not XLSX.
I believe there are packages available for the more popular scripting languages, such as Perl, Tcl, maybe Python, but not for AWK, that do this.
But I've never used any of them. Even though I'm doing my main processing
in AWK, I would not have a problem with using something in one of these other languages, if someone can/would "spoon feed" me on how to do it.
Finally, note that I've done this sort of thing in the past using Excel
macros and/or COM automation, to do it (i.e., automate it) in Excel itself. This is a possibility, but is kind of messy. I'd prefer a straight command line way.
Also, one of the issues that I'm trying to get around is that when you do
step 3 in the above list, you then have to mess around a fair amount in
Excel to re-size your columns, and restore other bits of meta-information
that got lost in step 1. This again, would be nice to have be automated by
the command line tool that I am seeking. As noted, I had previously done
this using Excel macros.
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