ImportExcelDoc
Version 1, changed by RussLipton. 04/18/2005. Show version history
Import Excel spreadsheets
Topic: transform the contents of Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheets into wiki pages as editable tables.
How To Do It:
1. You must first Create and Save a new wiki page (we named ours 'testExcelImport' and saved a bit of sample text):
Note: you can import an Excel spreadsheet document to an existing wiki page. The Excek document will over-write everything on that page. Since you can always revert to an earlier version, this is not a major problem. It may be what you want to do). Often, however, you will want to import an Excel spreadsheet to a new wiki page.
2. Click Import Excel Document from the More Actions menu:
3. Choose a document for import by finding it on your local machine (ours was on the desktop and named 'testExcelImport.xls'). Then, click Import document:
4. Our Excel spreadsheet looks similar in JotSpot. However, keep in mind that formulas are not imported. The spreadsheet cannot be recalculated in JotSpot. The original spreadsheet becomes an editable table within JotSpot (see Tell Me More below for more explanation):
5. You can make changes to your Excel spreadsheet and import it again. Here, we added another row:
6. Once imported, the Excel spreadsheet is now treated as a first-class JotSpot table. Like any table, you can edit it within either the WYSIWYG? or Script Markup editors. We added some styling and another row while also resizing the table:
Tell Me More:
If you use Microsoft Excel frequently (or a program that can create Excel-readable .xls files), you can use your local spreadsheet application to create wiki pages.
We recommend this feature for uploading (importing) Excel spreadsheets you have already created which are needed to support tasks and collaboration on the wiki. Your wiki can archive these documents - while also allowing them (optionally) to be edited as data tables by those with the appropriate page permissions.
Your mileage (the results of importing Microsoft Excel documents) may vary. Conversion (mapping) of a document created in one version of Excel (97, 2000 or XP 2002) for a specific operating system version (Windows 98, XP or even Mac OS/X) is complex. The results obtained when importing that document to another application (in this case, a wiki) may not always perfectly match the original document.
This is even truer with Excel import than with Microsoft Word import. Excel data is passed to JotSpot but not Excel formulas. You cannot recalculate an Excel spreadsheet in JotSpot.
Support for this feature may be added in the future. Meanwhile, you may take full advantage of JotSpot table editing to modify the look-and-feel of your data in your wiki.
If you experience serious anomalies or cannot import your spreadsheet, do by all means contact JotSpot support. Be ready to share exactly what version of Excel you were using as well as details about your machine and operating system. We will also need to know exactly what happened between the document as it was created and as it was imported so we can help you become more productive as quickly as possible.
Related Tasks:
Learn More About:
User Contributed Notes:
Click to add yours...By Hashim@hashim hashimwarren@yahoo.com on 04/23/2005 09:10AM
If you are looking to simply share an Excel spreadsheet with relevent information, simply upload the document as an attachment to the wiki page, instead of converting it into a wiki page. This will maintain all of the formatting and formulas created in Excel.
By admin@bibleskool russ.lipton@gmail.com on 04/24/2005 05:13PM
Or one could do both together, which I had never considered:
1. Attach one or more versions of the spreadsheet if this is an iterating series of calculations for a project. Versioning allows project members to inspect the full spreadsheet with its formulas over time.
2. Import any particular version of the spreadsheet into the wiki page so that its tabular data is easily viewable.
By chris@clozach on 05/24/2005 05:28PM
With a sprinkling of JotLib? code, Step 2 above can be eliminated entirely, with the added benefit of allowing regular edits to co-exist with the HTML version of your spreadsheet. For example...
1) Set up a page called IncludeTest? such that your breadcrumb trail looks like this: WikiHome >> IncludeTest?.
2) Attach an Excel doc named Fruit.xls to IncludeTest?
3) Edit IncludeTest? in Script Markup mode and type in the following:
The HTML version of your Excel doc will now automatically appear within the body of IncludeTest?. But here's the truly magical part....
4) Make changes to Fruit.xls, save those changes, and re-attach the doc to IncludeTest?. (JotSpot automatically saves it as Revision 2 of Fruit.xls.)
5) Refresh the page, and your changes will automatically appear in IncludeTest?! (Note that the refresh is necessary for the same reason that you don't see a "View as HTML" link when you first upload the doc: it takes the wiki engine a few seconds to translate the spreadsheet into HTML.)
Needless to say, this will be simply mind-blowing once our good friends at JotSpot have implemented WebDAV file edits and WYWIWYG-compatible <wiki:/> coding! :-D
By chris@clozach on 08/04/2005 10:19PM
Oops! I forgot to comment out the code in my example above, so it disappeared as JotSpot tried to interpret it.
So, at 3) above, type the following while in Script Markup mode:
<wiki:include path="WikiHome/IncludeTest/Fruit.xls" />
Attachments (6)
| File | By | Size | Attached | Ver. | ||
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importExcelOne.png | RussLipton | 17K | 03/30/2005 | 1 |
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importExcelThree.png | RussLipton | 29K | 03/30/2005 | 1 |
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importExcelFour.png | RussLipton | 11K | 03/30/2005 | 1 |
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importExcelFive.png | RussLipton | 13K | 03/30/2005 | 1 |
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importExcelSix.png | RussLipton | 27K | 03/30/2005 | 1 |
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demo1.xls | guest | 13K | 09/12/2005 | 1 |
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Bob Simony said via email, 04/30/2005:
How do I get the most recent version of Jotspot? I do not have the ImportExcel option.
Bob