How to convert Legacy XLS (97–03) Spreadsheet to PDF in Node.js

Legacy files, such as Excel’s old XLS format, are a source of many headaches, which you no doubt already know. There are a few ways to deal with outdated formats, including updating them to their modern counterpart (covered in a separate tutorial), or in the case of today, by turning them into lovely PDF files. Today we will be covering the method behind the latter approach.

We can begin with a simple client installation:

npm install cloudmersive-convert-api-client --save

Following that, call this function:

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';
// Uncomment the following line to set a prefix for the API key, e.g. "Token" (defaults to null)
//Apikey.apiKeyPrefix = 'Token';
var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ConvertDocumentApi();
var inputFile = "/path/to/file"; // File | Input file to perform the operation on.
var callback = function(error, data, response) {
if (error) {
console.error(error);
} else {
console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
}
};
apiInstance.convertDocumentXlsToPdf(inputFile, callback);

Now any XLS files that you drop into convertDocumentXlsToPdf will be repackaged nicely by the API as PDF files. How easy was that?