Parsing XLS and XLSX (MS Excel) files with Ruby?

I recently needed to parse some Excel files with Ruby. The abundance of libraries and options turned out to be confusing, so I wrote a blog post about it.

Here is a table of different Ruby libraries and what they support:

If you care about performance, here is how the xlsx libraries compare:

I have sample code to read xlsx files with each supported library here

Here are some examples for reading xlsx files with some different libraries:

rubyXL

require 'rubyXL'

workbook = RubyXL::Parser.parse './sample_excel_files/xlsx_500_rows.xlsx'
worksheets = workbook.worksheets
puts "Found #{worksheets.count} worksheets"

worksheets.each do |worksheet|
  puts "Reading: #{worksheet.sheet_name}"
  num_rows = 0
  worksheet.each do |row|
    row_cells = row.cells.map{ |cell| cell.value }
    num_rows += 1
  end
  puts "Read #{num_rows} rows"
end

roo

require 'roo'

workbook = Roo::Spreadsheet.open './sample_excel_files/xlsx_500_rows.xlsx'
worksheets = workbook.sheets
puts "Found #{worksheets.count} worksheets"

worksheets.each do |worksheet|
  puts "Reading: #{worksheet}"
  num_rows = 0
  workbook.sheet(worksheet).each_row_streaming do |row|
    row_cells = row.map { |cell| cell.value }
    num_rows += 1
  end
  puts "Read #{num_rows} rows" 
end

creek

require 'creek'

workbook = Creek::Book.new './sample_excel_files/xlsx_500_rows.xlsx'
worksheets = workbook.sheets
puts "Found #{worksheets.count} worksheets"

worksheets.each do |worksheet|
  puts "Reading: #{worksheet.name}"
  num_rows = 0
  worksheet.rows.each do |row|
    row_cells = row.values
    num_rows += 1
  end
  puts "Read #{num_rows} rows"
end

simple_xlsx_reader

require 'simple_xlsx_reader'

workbook = SimpleXlsxReader.open './sample_excel_files/xlsx_500000_rows.xlsx'
worksheets = workbook.sheets
puts "Found #{worksheets.count} worksheets"

worksheets.each do |worksheet|
  puts "Reading: #{worksheet.name}"
  num_rows = 0
  worksheet.rows.each do |row|
    row_cells = row
    num_rows += 1
  end
  puts "Read #{num_rows} rows"
end

Here is an example of reading a legacy xls file using the spreadsheet library:

spreadsheet

require 'spreadsheet'

# Note: spreadsheet only supports .xls files (not .xlsx)
workbook = Spreadsheet.open './sample_excel_files/xls_500_rows.xls'
worksheets = workbook.worksheets
puts "Found #{worksheets.count} worksheets"

worksheets.each do |worksheet|
  puts "Reading: #{worksheet.name}"
  num_rows = 0
  worksheet.rows.each do |row|
    row_cells = row.to_a.map{ |v| v.methods.include?(:value) ? v.value : v }
    num_rows += 1
  end
  puts "Read #{num_rows} rows"
end