Reading data from Excel in Haskell

Question

I would like to get data from .xls files without manually opening Excel. One possibility is to use COM automation.

There are the com-1.2.3 and hdirect packages, but I can't find any examples of how to use these packages with Excel.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

Answer 1

With something like this, if your needs are relatively simple, I've found that it's more straightforward to find/write a command line executable that just pulls out a csv from the xls file. Then you invoke that executable from haskell, and proceed with its output from there.