# Correct Excel Formatting for Importing Data into HubDB

**URL:** <https://community.hubspot.com/t/correct-excel-formatting-for-importing-data-into-hubdb/20953>\
**Category:** CMS Development\
**Tags:** hubdb\
**Created:** [May 18, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/correct-excel-formatting-for-importing-data-into-hubdb/20953 "2020-05-18T13:36:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![sarah-knowmad](https://d10pqhm3lwygmk.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/community.hubspot.com/sarah-knowmad/32/95715_2.png) [@sarah-knowmad](https://community.hubspot.com/u/sarah-knowmad)\
**Post date:** [May 18, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/correct-excel-formatting-for-importing-data-into-hubdb/20953/1 "2020-05-18T13:36:54Z")

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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!!

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**Author:** ![Kevin-C](https://d10pqhm3lwygmk.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/community.hubspot.com/kevin-c/32/34570_2.png) [@Kevin-C](https://community.hubspot.com/u/Kevin-C)\
**Post date:** [May 18, 2020, 11:25pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/correct-excel-formatting-for-importing-data-into-hubdb/20953/2 "2020-05-18T23:25:01Z")

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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**](https://designers.hubspot.com/docs/hubl/filters#escape) filter to ignore the special characters when populating into the html.