title: Extracting data from Excel Pivot Table Spreadsheet in Linux
body: <p>I have an excel spreadsheet based on a pivot table that is periodically updated (monthly) and uploaded to my server (generated by a group that is very hesitant to changing anything in the output).  I would like to be able to write a script that I could run via cron job to process and load the raw data from the pivot table into my database.  </p>
  
  <p>However, I can't figure out how to get at the underlying data without manually going into windows, opening the file in excel, double-clicking the totals cell, getting a new sheet with all the raw data that went into populating that cell, and saving that sheet as a csv, that I can then load into my database via some language (in my case python).  It seems like their should be some scriptable way to extract the underlying data.</p>
  
  <p>I only have linux machines (running windows/office in a VM; but I'd prefer a solution that doesn't involve windows).  I am familiar with tools like xls2csv (which doesn't access the raw data) and using tools like python-unoconv to edit openoffice documents from python.  However, even manually using openoffice I don't see a way to get at the underlying data.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: After spending a good few hours not making any progress (prior to posting this), I'm not starting to make some by converting it to ODS via unoconv and likely will be able to use something with python-odf to extract the last sheet (Called 'DPCache').</p>
  
  <p>So now the problem is to get a sheet from an ODS converted into a CSV; which shouldn't be too hard for me to figure out (though help is greatly appreciated).</p>