The CSVFile product provides the CSVFile Zope object, which extends the Zope File object by detecting when a MS-Excel file (.xls) is uploaded and automatically translating the data to CSV format (.csv).

The CSVFile product does this by calling a PERL script (included) to do the actual translation from MS-Excel data using PERL's Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package, which must be installed for CSVFile to function properly. The Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package can be obtained from CPAN.

To function properly, the CSVFile product also needs to know where to find the PERL executable. This is set by modifying the "PERL_PATH" variable at the top of CSVFile.py.