PowerShell Script to Bulk-Change Excel File Formats

Today I had to find a way to change file formats for a lot of files. Here at Jelastic we use JIRA for bug-report tracking. Every week I am getting tons of automated reports from JIRA to send around to our partners and so on. The problem is that JIRA exports reports in some weird html format with xls extention, and although Windows Excel can open it (after displaying ‘the file format and extension do not match’ warnings) – Macs cannot.

Opening and resaving lots of files manually was not an option – PowerShell was. 🙂

[UPDATE] I’ve made a few minor changes per feedback from Stanley – now properly managing file extansions and formats.

Here’s the script that you can reuse if you have a similar problem to solve:

############################
# PowerShell script to open all Excel files in a folder
# and re-save them in proper format
# (c) Dmitry Sotnikov
############################

# create COM object to use Excel
$objExcel = new-object -comobject excel.application

$objExcel.Visible = $True

# open the files to re-save one by one
dir D:\myfolder\*.xls | ForEach-Object {
$doc = $objExcel.WorkBooks.Open($_.FullName)

# Save in new format and with new extension
# Format codes can be found here:
# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff198017.aspx
$doc.SaveAs(“$($_.Directory)\$($_.BaseName).xlsx”,
[Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlFileFormat]::xlOpenXMLWorkbook)
$doc.close()
}

$objExcel.Quit()
$objExcel = $null