Convert XLSX File to XML on Mac (Open XML)

This is a rare case, did you know that in this the modern days all document types are standardized with Office Open XML or OOXML. This format including docx, xlsx, pptx and basically other office documents that has leading "x" on the extension.

Rename The File

These files are actually a ZIP file with some XML files inside of it, you can open the xml files by changing the name for example "mysheet.xlsx" to "mysheet.zip"

Renamed file

Install 7zip

To be able extract the xml files inside the mysheet.zip, the best approach is to use 7zip. 7zip is open source software that can extract various compressed files including zip file. You can see further information at their site on 7-zip.org.

Unfortunately, there's no Mac version provided on the official site, so we use brew to install it via terminal.

brew install p7zip

I everything is ok, you can start to use 7zip via 7z command on the terminal, which will gives you the display of the available options similar like this.

Extract the XML

Now is the time to start the extraction using 7z command.

Try to execute this command precisely on the folder of mysheet.zip

7z x mysheet.zip -oxml-files

After executing the command, you will get a new folder called xml-files with the xml content inside of it.

Now you can explore the content of the document files, and also do some experimenting and learning the structure of that open xml format.