>>>>>>I might be wrong, but I thought there was a tool that allows importing XLS files without having Excel installed?
>>>>>
>>>>>Unzip the xlsx, and then in the xl subfolder there's sheet1.xml, sheet2.xml etc. Then read the xml and get the values.
>>>>
>>>>PMFJI, but how do you Unzip an xlsx file? I am using legacy pkzip25.exe but I can't figure what you mean.
>>>
>>>Just like you unzip any other zip file, just
>>>
>>>pkzip25 -ext=all -nofix -over=all whatever.xlsx
>>
>>My pkzip25 always looks for the extension .zip. That is, the above syntax creates an error
>>

>>cannot find .zip file: whatever.xlsx.zip
>>

>>But if I rename it to .zip, it works.
>
>A, stupid windows and whoever invented file extnsions in the first place is probably just as a great idiot as the guy who decided that these should be handled invisibly... they created so much confusion, even seasoned programmers like you can't get it clear - when is a dot in the name really meaning the extension, or is the extension assumed. Well, in your case, it seems to be assumed, it thinks the extension is to be .zip... so I had to try this:
>
>pkzip25 -ext=all -nofix -over=all "whatever.xlsx"
>
>but no, doesn't work either, you really have to rename it to a .zip - well I guess Phil Katz didn't foresee, 20 years ago, that there will be zips masked as other file types.
>
>I use pkzip25 programmatically all the time, but for manual zipping/unzipping I use whatever TotalCommander uses, which I thought was pkzip25, but obviously isn't. In it, ctrl+pgdn opens the currently selected file as an archive (and it will detect the type of the archive - works with almost anything except 7z and arj).

and for RAR you have to point Totalcommander to WinRAR, which it then can drive programmatically...
which you can do also via commandline, giving you multithreaded compression gaining a nice percentage in speed and smaller results