My customers send me data in .XLS and .MDB formatted files. Spreadsheet data always consists of a single tab. Access .MDB data always consists of less than 100 fields. All the fields are numbers, text, or dates.

My computer runs Linux. I code in Perl 5.8.8. OS is Linux (Centos 2.6.18-128.7.1.el5, but what I code typically runs anywhere Red Hat, SUSE, or other major distros.)

I am looking for a free (or very cheap) utility that will convert the data to tab-delimited ASCII files.

The solution MUST be able to be called from Linux shell scripts so a command line interface would be ideal. An interactive GUI application will NOT work for me.

Excel can save to delimited file as standard and access can export to the same.
I would ask you customers to send the information in this format.