I had to generate Abstract book for #NGSchool2016 (). I had spreadsheet generated by Google Forms with all necessary information. I could copy-paste all entries and format it later on, but I found LaTeX more robust for the task.
As I had already LaTeX template, the only missing part was conversion of .xls to .tex. Thus I have written simple script, xls2tex.py, that generate .tex file based on table from .xls file.
This script, among many other things, convert utf into LaTeX escape characters.

xls2tex.py depends on xlrd and utf8tolatex (from pylatexenc/latexencode, but this is given as single file)

# install dependencies
sudo apt-get install python-xlrd

# generate tex
xls2tex.py

# generate pdf
make

Output pdf.