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).