Beta: Excel file importer

[Jason]

We’ve just launched a new beta feature that allows you to import entire Excel files into Airtable. You can use this feature to create a brand new base, or, add all worksheets within an Excel file as new tables in an existing base.

A couple highlights are:

• Every sheet in the Excel workbook will be imported as a table.
• Field types are automatically detected from the cell types. This works for dates, checkboxes, multi-selects, multi-line text, rich text, numbers, currencies, and percents!

If you’d like to sign up for the beta please fill out this short form. After you’ve signed up you can learn more about using the beta feature in this support article.

Hope you enjoy the new functionality!

[ScottWorld]

Very cool! This is great! :cowboy_hat_face: :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: :raised_hands:

Questions regarding the support article:

1. What is a “Multi-Line Text” field in Airtable? The support article distinguishes this from both “Single Line Text” and “Rich Text” (which should really say “Long Text + RTF formatting”). Did this mean to say “Long Text” instead of “Multi-Line Text”?

2. This sentence below (from the support article) makes sense to me, but most people don’t know what “type coercion” means. The rest of the article talks about conversions & converting data, so I think it would be better to stick to the word “conversion” instead of “coercion”:
   The type coercion operates on the computation result of the formula.

[Jason]

Good suggestions @ScottWorld! I’ve updated the article to reflect them.

[ScottWorld]

This is fantastic! Thanks so much! :slightly_smiling_face:

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

most people don’t know what “type coercion” means.

Is this a liberal or conservative thing? :expressionless:

[M_k]

Hi @Bill.French

You’re funny.

Mary K

[Laurie_Phillips]

The 2MB limit per file is a deal-killer. To get down to that limit I can only have one file with a single sheet of 2000 rows and 200 columns. Most are empty and the ones that contain data have, on average, 5 text characters or fewer. Can you increase that to at least 10MB per file?

[Bill_French]

Laurie_Phillips:

Most are empty and the ones that contain data have, on average, 5 text characters or fewer. Can you increase that to at least 10MB per file?

I saw this limitation and considered it likely temporary while in beta. Developers often set constraints like this until they’ve captured some analytics about performance so they don’t inadvertently risk turning over the applecart.

[Beck_Hoehn]

I think I am having a similar issue. I have a workbook with multiple sheets which will not convert to a csv file. Is the reason it is not uploading because of the file size?

[Naya_Moss]

This worked perfectly for a project I was working on this weekend!

I had to remove the table format in excel first, but eventually worked on the 2nd try! :grinning: