Years ago I wrote a function for opening excel from R. While I would never use Excel for data analysis, it turns out it’s pretty good for sorting and browsing data. Thats why I wrote a simple bash alias for opening up text documents from the terminal.

function excel() {
    tmp=`mktemp`
    out=${1}
    cat ${out} > $tmp
    open -a "Microsoft Excel" $tmp
}

Usage:

cat spreadsheet.tsv | excel