[ctolkien]

> Can you do this in Powershell quickly? I don't know, I am actually curious.

You can basically do the same thing with Powershell. I don't know of a 'built-in' module to handle XLS->CSV conversion, so you need to bring one in:

  Install-Module ImportExcel

Then:

  ls *.xlsx -r | %{ Import-excel $_ } | ? { $_.Name -eq "Miller" } | sort

That's my naive, Powershell noob approach anyway.

There's another option however, where you can leverage Excel itself (granted, this is likely to be a Windows only approach):

  $excel = New-Object -com excel.application

And you can now open XLS/XLSX files and operate on them as an actual excel document (including iterating through workbooks/ worksheets, etc.). It's all just objects.

[progman]

Thanks for pointing this out. However, your example is not equivalent since "ls" searches only in the current directory. Nevertheless it is good to know that it's basically possible since it helps a lot to manage mixed Windows/Linux networks.

[ctolkien]

Not true. The -r flag I specified is for "recurse", will search current and all sub-directories.