How to Convert an XSLX File to CSV with UTF-8 Encoding Using LibreOffice / OpenOffice

Thanks to this stackoverflow answer I stumbled upon the comment by Aryeh Leib Taurog who shared his solution and a link to the OpenOffice documentation on the available options for the CSV filter. Here's how to convert the file input.xlsx to the UTF-8 encoded file input.csv in the current directory, with semicolons as field delimiter: soffice.exe --convert-to "csv:Text - txt - csv (StarCalc):59,,76,1" input.xlsx On my Windows system the soffice.exe is located under C:\Program Files\LibreOffice 5\program. Hre's the explanation of the cryptic filter arguments: csv – the extension of the output file Text - txt - csv (StarCalc) – the (ancient) name of the filter (kept for compatibility) 59,,76,1 – these are four arguments: the first parameter is the delimiter in the output file – 59 is the ASCII code for ';' the second parameter is the text delimiter – it's missing because I don't want to wrap text in quotes the third parameter is the file encoding – 76 is the internal OpenOffice code for UTF-8 (from the table on the documentation page) the fourth parameter defines the line number with which to start the export – here, we start with line 1 Thank you, open source community, and happy converting! PS: For non-windows users, Gnumeric with its command line tool ssconvert might be a good choice for this job, as well.