XLS to CSV or R data.frame

I need to (non-manually) download this file and convert the contents to a data.frame, the ability to ignore a few rows would be useful.

The file itself can be taken from:

http://ift.tt/1bLK2Ur

Here's what I've done so far:

1. I've tried XLConnect (returns error)


2. I've tried RODBC (returns error)


3. I've tried xlrd in Python (returns error)

If you open the file in notepad, it's an xml file, and when opening in Excel, you get a warning message "The format and extension don't match".

It doesn't matter to me if the solution is in python or R, so long as the result is usable in R.