What's the fastest way to get content of multiple xls files?

Question

I have a set of 1200 xls files of which I need to create a csv-file containing

• The value of Cell A1 (if A1 is empty, take B1)
• The value of Cell A2 (if A2 is empty, take B2)
• The filename
• ID of String of Cell A2 (just a counter variable that is not incremented if the value of A1 has already been found, could be calculated afterwards)

The files are all Excel 97 files with a size between 25 and 500 KB.

While I know that it can be done in VBA, I assume it's way to slow. I know that it could be done in php (somehow) or Java. I don't know if the Win7 Batch or Mac OS X Terminal could help me. Any other ideas? I'm looking for the fastest way to solve this problem.

Answer 1

You need POI lib to read XLS files in Java but it is hard to grasp in you do not have enough Java experience. (the problem is that it sometimes encouters a problem and just cannot handle some XLS files for no particular reason)

Another stuff is PYTHON's xlrd which is much easier.

What you choose depends on you. If you are in a hurry xlrd would be better.