Decimating Excel files

[Phil Schmidt]

gonzlobo wrote:

> We have a data acquisition program that saves its output to Excel's
> .xls format. Unfortunately, the programmer was too stupid to write
> files the average user can read.
>
> I'd like some advice on how to go about:
> 1. Reading a large Excel file and chop it into many Excel files (with
> only 65535 lines per file)
> or
> 2. Decimate an Excel file & write... say every other line (user
> selectable)... to a new file.

Is the file format really native Excel, or is a CSV or TSV file? I've
seen apps (one is a data acquisition program, as a matter of fact)
that create "Excel" files that are just CSV or TSV files. Try opening
the file with a text editor to see if it's plain ASCII text.

In any case, if it's a CSV or TSV file, the Python CSV module is your
friend.