How to convert Legacy Excel XLS to CSV in Python

Are you stuck dealing with old XLS spreadsheets from 2003? This can cause all sorts of annoying problems, so it is generally better to just update these files to something better like CSV format. The library we will be using today also supports directly converting between XLS and XLSX, but that’s a different article.

Installation of the client goes like this:

pip install cloudmersive-convert-api-client

From this point, we will be creating our API instance and then calling convert_document_xls_to_csv using that instance. Here’s the code for that.

from __future__ import print_function
import time
import cloudmersive_convert_api_client
from cloudmersive_convert_api_client.rest import ApiException
from pprint import pprint
# Configure API key authorization: Apikey
configuration = cloudmersive_convert_api_client.Configuration()
configuration.api_key['Apikey'] = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
# Uncomment below to setup prefix (e.g. Bearer) for API key, if needed
# configuration.api_key_prefix['Apikey'] = 'Bearer'
# create an instance of the API class
api_instance = cloudmersive_convert_api_client.ConvertDocumentApi(cloudmersive_convert_api_client.ApiClient(configuration))
input_file = '/path/to/file' # file | Input file to perform the operation on.
try:
# Convert Excel XLS (97-03) Spreadsheet to CSV
api_response = api_instance.convert_document_xls_to_csv(input_file)
pprint(api_response)
except ApiException as e:
print("Exception when calling ConvertDocumentApi->convert_document_xls_to_csv: %s\n" % e)

And really, that’s it. Like shooting fish in a barrel.