Convert XLS to Parquet

XLS files are Excel files that use the Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF), which was the default format for Excel versions 97-2003.

XLS files can contain multiple sheets, and each sheet can contain multiple rows and columns of data. They support various data types, including text, numbers, dates, and formulas.

Key features of XLS files include:

• Compatibility with older versions of Excel and other spreadsheet software
• Ability to store formatting information, charts, and macros
• Smaller file size compared to newer formats like XLSX
• Limited to 65,536 rows and 256 columns per sheet

While XLS files are still widely used, they are gradually being replaced by the more modern XLSX format.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format optimized for use with big data processing frameworks. It offers efficient data compression and encoding schemes, which leads to significant storage savings and improved read performance.

Parquet is designed to support complex nested data structures and enables efficient querying and manipulation of specific columns without reading the entire dataset.

Compression

Parquet supports various compression algorithms such as Snappy, Gzip, and LZO. These compression techniques help in reducing the storage space and improving the performance of data processing tasks.