The embedded carriage returns can be replaced with '\n' using this simple script on the Red Hat box: 
use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
    chomp;
    if (/^M$/) {
        print "$_\n";
    } else {
        print "$_\\n";
    }
}

[download]
'^M' is single character, entered pressing 'ctrl-v enter'.

Update: The direct conversion does not seem to be hopeless. You can simply omit the $converter if you do not need encoding conversion. I created an xlsx file with ~1.000.000 rows and with only two columns (file size ~10Mb) and it was converted to csv in 140sec.

In reply to Re: Convert XLSX to TSV and remove CRLF in cells by pme
in thread Convert XLSX to TSV and remove CRLF in cells by bulrush

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