Programmatically extract data from an Excel spreadsheet
csv, excel, perl, python, ruby
Solution
There is a really good Perl library for xls reading: Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.
Problem
Is there a simple way, using some common Unix scripting language (Perl/Python/Ruby) or command line utility, to convert an Excel Spreadsheet file to CSV? Specifically, this one: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data/ie_data.xls And specifically the third sheet of that spreadsheet (the first two being charts).