This short script converts the Excel files from the supplementary materials of Schich et al. to CSV text files (compressed with gzip).
import pandas as pd
fnames = ["SchichDataS1_FB.xlsx", "SchichDataS2_AKL.xlsx",
"SchichDataS3_ULAN.xlsx", "SchichDataS4_WCEN.xlsx"]
for fi in fnames:
print fi
data = pd.read_excel(fi)
data = data.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)
out_name = fi.replace(".xlsx", ".csv.gz")
out = gzip.open(out_name, "w")
data.to_csv(out, encoding="utf-8")
out.close()