I’m pretty sure there used to be a way to export form results directly to an Excel file. Now the only option I’m seeing is the CSV export. Am I missing some setting or do I need some external package that would do the job?
Yes, I do know you can import CSV into Excel, but it requires multiple steps (like setting delimiter, encoding, column types etc) and is challenging for non-tech-savvy users.
Looks like over 10 years ago, that may have been the case, but looking at the code, it was actually exporting an HTML table which Excel then imported (see this old discussion about it).
Modern Concrete CMS exports as CSV which Excel does import and should do so fairly automatically these days. I don’t think I’ve ever had to specify delimiters and column types when importing CSV data into a spreadsheet in at least a decade.
Google Sheets also does a good job of automatically converting CSV to spreadsheet data, so you could try importing into a Google Sheet, then exporting from there as Excel (essentially using Google Sheets as a converter).
Yep, the funny thing is that even the documentation says:
" 1. Choose your preferred export format, such as CSV."
…and then there’s only CSV option available.
Depending on your locale settings, Excel might default to having “;” as the delimiter instead of “,” which requires setting the delimiter manually on import. Also, if you have any accented characters in the data, you might need to change the encoding. Finally, fields like phone number lose the leading zero if they are treated as numbers instead of a text/string.
Would be handy if there was some export settings (like the delimiter) on Concrete side.
I’ve updated that documentation page to make it clearer that CSV is the only option.
To be honest, I don’t use Excel, but I’m surprised it doesn’t handle CSVs more intelligently.
For customizing CSV export options, you’ll need to make a feature request and/or submit a pull request here: GitHub · Where software is built