Correct Excel Formatting for Importing Data into HubDB

I am working on a product catalog that will have about 400 products uploaded into HubDB. We are building the catalog in Excel, and I want to make sure the cells are correclty formatted to import properly into HubDB. I’ve tested this a few times and the issues are mainly around how the excel cells are importing into HubDB rich text modues.

Is there something I can do for bulleted lists inside excel to pull in an actual bulleted list in a HubDB rich text module? Simply having a “bullet” symbol does not pull in a proper bulleted list.

Hard returns within a cell also do not import properly, it pulls in as a big paragraph rather than spaced paragraphs.

Thanks for any insight!!

Hey @sarah-knowmad

In these types of situations I like to separate the data from the display. Adding data formatting to a spreadsheet is asking for trouble! Think invisble characters like hard return, non-breaking spaces, etc. If you’ve ever copy pasted out of a PDF generataed by an adobe product, you know what I’m talking about.

So off the top of my head I might approach it like this:

  • You could paste the bullets into the cell as an array. Then using hubl in the template. to populate the data as needed. Probaly a for loop.
    - I believe this would mimic the output of a multi-select column in HubDB. To test you could create a text table with a multi select option and download that as a spreadsheet.

You could also include HTML in the data.

  • Paste the list in the cell as marked up HTML. <ul> <li>value 1</li> <li>value 2</li> </ul> etc..
    - I believe the data will be treated as a string, then you can use the escape filter to ignore the special characters when populating into the html.