A lot of public health folks use Excel as their database and even GISAID/EpiFlu still only allows downloads of metadata as an xls file. Users often run into data parsing issues when converting Excel to TSV, so it seems like we can reduce a lot of this friction by supporting Excel as an input format for Augur commands.
I think augur curate is at least a good place to start and we can add support for Excel across all other Augur commands later.
Context
Previously mentioned in https://github.com/nextstrain/augur/pull/1039#issuecomment-1252912107 and https://github.com/nextstrain/augur/issues/1475.
A lot of public health folks use Excel as their database and even GISAID/EpiFlu still only allows downloads of metadata as an xls file. Users often run into data parsing issues when converting Excel to TSV, so it seems like we can reduce a lot of this friction by supporting Excel as an input format for Augur commands.
I think
augur curateis at least a good place to start and we can add support for Excel across all other Augur commands later.