Converting xlsx to xls using Microsoft Office Compitablity Pack's excelcnv

excel ms-office command-line-tool
Idan Arye picture Idan Arye · Oct 10, 2011 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

The internet says that you can convert xlsx files to xls files using Microsoft Office Compitablity like this:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\excelcnv" -nme -oice D:\test\new.xlsx D:\test\old.xls
However, this works backwards - it converts xls files to xlsx files. Does anyone know the excelcnv switches to convert xlsx to xls?

Answer

Alex Hall picture Alex Hall · Feb 4, 2015

For me, using the compatibility (conversion) pack for Office 2003, simply switching the places of the parameters in the example you cite works; e.g. if this also works for ~\Office14 (which I assume and hope it does), change the command this way:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\excelcnv" -nme -oice D:\test\old.xls D:\test\new.xlsx

In my case, the particular command that gets it to work, which I found yonder (and simply reversed the parameters like so), is this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\excelcnv.exe" -oice "C:\scripts\test1.xls" "C:\scripts\test1.xlsx"

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