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I have a fairly complex (by my standards) process that extracts Excel files (.xls) from certain inbound emails and saves them in a directory on my Debian/Squeeze machine.

My next step would have been to use xls2csv (catdoc) to convert the .xls files into .csv, before modifying it using regex and loading it into a database.

However, I just realized that each sheet in the .xls files is locked, preventing xls2csv from converting them into .csv format.

Is there a command/solution to batch unprotect the sheets in .xls files in a directory? (The idea is to unprotect them in-place, without opening them one at a time.)

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I am not sure, but I am reasonably confident that you will have to open each file individually because the sheet locking is a worksheet property rather than a file level property. – Pynner Jan 27 at 16:46
Just a wild guess: LibreOffice has extensive internal APIs, perhaps there is a way of doing this? – vonbrand Jan 28 at 1:42
@vonbrand Possibly. I will scour through the LibreOffice documentation. FYI, I also tried pyexcelerator, hoping that it might convert locked worksheets into .csv, but it didn't work. – Spartanblogger Jan 28 at 3:48

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