ps: i know i am a bit out of topic.
i had taken a record out from my db and put it into excel format. now i have sent the file into a unix environment.
my problem is i have problem reading the excel file as unix don't read .xls.
so is there any way or tools to convert it into txt form in unix?
if no how about in windows converting from excel into txt?
thanks

use Excel and store it either as csv or whatever sounds appropriate
or use open office to convert it

it there any tools that do it without much manual work? cos my job are mainly for batch processing. thanks

Try catdoc's brother, xls2csv :

http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/

Also:
doing it natively on UNIX might be hard.
I believe perl provide Excell related module:
Spreadsheet::Writeexcel


Also I'd suggest browsing USENET [and/or google]:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...e+Search&meta=