Installing the command-line executable

Assuming you have Rust/Cargo installed, run this command in a terminal:

cargo install agent-xlsx

It will make the agent-xlsx command available in your PATH if you've allowed the PATH to be modified when installing Rust. cargo uninstall agent-xlsx uninstalls.

Back to the crate overview.

Readme

agent-xlsx

A small CLI for reading and editing .xlsx files, designed for agents. JSON in, JSON out; A1 range notation everywhere; structured JSON errors on stderr.

📖 Full usage docs live in skills/agent-xlsx/SKILL.md. That file is the skill definition consumed by npx skills add and by Claude agents; it doubles as the human-readable reference.

Install

# Latest release, to a dir on PATH
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carderne/agent-xlsx/main/install.sh \
    | bash -s -- ~/.local/bin

Supported targets: Apple Silicon macOS, x86_64 Linux, x86_64 Windows.

As a Claude skill

npx skills add carderne/agent-xlsx

As a pi package

pi install npm:agent-xlsx

Quick taste

agent-xlsx create book.xlsx
agent-xlsx edit   book.xlsx A1:C1 '["name","age","city"]'
agent-xlsx edit   book.xlsx A2:C3 '[["Alice",30,"Berlin"],["Bob",42,"Paris"]]'
agent-xlsx read   book.xlsx A1:C3
# [["name","age","city"],["Alice",30.0,"Berlin"],["Bob",42.0,"Paris"]]

Evals

Currently... it's mostly worse than just Python. Did Anthropic try this already?

task	model	py-fail	py-time	cli-time	py-tokens	cli-tokens	py-turns	cli-turns
bulk_filter_bold	claude-haiku-4-5	0	11.2s	+81%	914	+146%	3	+67%
conditional_color	claude-haiku-4-5	0	9.1s	+20%	741	+51%	2	+50%
edit_formula_totals	claude-haiku-4-5	0	8.2s	-4%	593	-10%	2	0%
edit_sparse	claude-haiku-4-5	0	15.0s	-26%	858	-14%	4	0%
moving_avg	claude-haiku-4-5	3	11.5s	+100%	947	+123%	2	+250%
reorder_cols	claude-haiku-4-5	0	12.0s	+23%	1076	+13%	2	+150%
style_header	claude-haiku-4-5	0	7.7s	+13%	529	+16%	2	0%

Building from source

cargo build --release
cargo test