excelchop extracts data out of Microsoft Excel files and sends it to standard output. From here, you can pipe the data through other filters to achieve your goals.
By default, excelchop will return all the data within the first worksheet. Using the '-r' option, you can specify a subset range. You can either specify the range like
excelchop -r A1:B10 excelfile.xlsx
or you can allow excelchop to automatically find the last row. You can use the special range syntax 'startrow:startcolumn:endcolumn'.
excelchop -r 2:A:D excelfile.xlsx
This will start at row 2, extracting data from columns A to D, stopping once it reaches a row in which ANY of the values are empty or whitespace. You can use the options -A, -s, or -S, to change this stopping behavior.
The default delimiter is a tab character and output records are separated by a Unix newline. excelchop also removes any newline characters within a field. Output is UTF-8 encoded without a BOM.