Install ssconvert (part of gnumeric) on a server without GNOME

I need to use gnumeric's file conversion tool ssconvert on a server.

The problem is that gnumeric is a gnome application and can't be installed without a desktop installed.

There is also no separate packages for ssconvert, and I can not compile it from source code...

I need this specific conversion tool cause it can covert from Excel XML format to CSV, which I was unable to do with other excel conversion tools.

I am working on a ubuntu 12.04 server. I would appreciate any ideas.

Solution 1:

I think many of the dependencies for gnumeric are actually "recommended" packages, not real dependencies. Try this:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnumeric

For me, this installed about 37MB of packages, most of which were libraries and icon themes, which I felt was tolerable.

Solution 2:

I know you're asking specifically about ssconvert, but in my case I gave up trying to install gnumeric without the Gnome dependencies. Instead, I'm using xls2csv (which is part of the catdoc package) with the same results.

Suppose you have a source.xls file. This command:

xls2csv -s 8859-1 -d 8859-1 source.xls > destination.csv

will do the trick. The parameters -s y -d specify the source and destination charset. This example will process a source file that includes special characters such as 'ñ'. Hope this helps!