Excellent Conversions (and downloads)

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This one was on a back burner for a while too.

C:\Program Files*\Microsoft Office\root\Office*\excelcnv.exe is a program that helps to convert various documents to XLSX format. While playing around with it I noticed it accepts URLs hence you can use it to download stuff from the internet. The caveat is that this downloaded data will be stored inside a UTF8-encoded stream embedded inside the XLSX Zip archive.

Example binary data (favicon.ico):

and data downloaded as a stream:

The command line arguments for excelcnv.exe are not documented well. Many examples online refer to “-oice” argument followed by the input and output file names. That’s it. And yeah, this actually works, so since I have already mentioned that input parameter can be an URL, the downloader invocation can be as follows:

excelcnv.exe -oice <URL> <OUPUT>

Still, there is more to discover.

For instance, what the heck is ‘oice’? After googling around I eventually discovered it stands for Office Isolated Conversion Environment.

Other interesting stuff to look at are other, undocumented command line arguments used by excelcnv.exe – these I found so far are as follows:

  • -oics – don’t know how it is being used at the moment
  • -bcs – you can use it to convert INPUT file to .ods e.g.
    • excelcnv.exe -bcs <XLSX> <ODS>
  • -repair
  • -o – orientation (for PDF)
  • -ps – paper size (for PDF)
  • -dps – default paper size (for PDF)
  • -scl – scaling option (for PDF)
  • -wtp – what to print (for PDF)
  • -preview – preview quality (for PDF)
  • -pofo – automatic print on file open (for PDF)
  • -nafap – use named action setting (for PDF)
  • -pglim – page limit (for PDF)
  • -rv – unknown (for PDF)

There are probably more, but this is what I explored so far.

The default OUTPUT file type is XLSX. The file format can be changed using a dedicated file extension accepted by the program:

  • .xltx
  • .xlam
  • .xlsm
  • .ods
  • .xls*
  • .pdf
  • .xlsx
  • .png
  • .jpg

but not sure yet how to use all of them as not all of them worked for me (good news is that all the *.xl* work well with “-oice” command).