Excel Uploader (Free)

First of all, you need an Excel workbook in the .xls format.  Currently only Excel 97-2003 formatted workbooks are accepted.  This workbook should contain no more than 15,000 rows of data.  Each row of data will be saved as one article in Joomla!

The titles of articles are taken from column 1 in the workbook.

There are two parameters that must be assigned values before uploading any files.  These are called "First Data Row" and "Content Format".

"First Data Row" refers to the row that data begins on that should be saved as articles.  So if you had headers in row 1 you would set this value to row 2 and if you had no headers then you would simply start the data from row 1.

"Content Format" refers to the way that the uploaded data will be presented in the article.  This should contain references to the columns from the Excel workbook as placeholders {x} and it usually will contain some HTML formatting tags as well.

For example, let's say we had the following data in our Excel workbook.

Store	StoreID	Apples	Bananas	Pears
Bob's Deli	123	€0.45	€0.55	€0.32
Graeme's Grocery	456	€0.23	€0.34	€0.11

Two articles would be uploaded from this data and their titles would be "Bob's Deli" and "Graeme's Grocery".  Their intro texts would be "123" and "456", respectively.

We would set "First Data Row" equal to 2.

"Content Format" could look something like this:

<h1>{1}</h1></br><p>Cost of Apples - {3}</p><p>Cost of Bananas - {4}</p><p>Cost of Pears - {5}</p>

Intro texts, meta descriptions, meta keys, meta robots and meta authors are all constructed in the same way using the parameters "Intro Text Format", "Meta Description Format", "Meta Key Format", "Meta Robots Format" and "Meta Author Format".  If you don't want to use any of these fields then you just need to leave the previous parameters blank.

If you have Categories and Sections for your articles you can select these before the start of the upload so that the articles are assigned to the correct places.  This sample data can be downloaded as an Excel file from here.

Give the component a try and if you can't get it to work then ask a question in our support forums!

The Excel Uploader makes use of a popular piece of code originally developed by Vadim Tkachenko under the name PHPExcelReader.  This allows for the reading of .xls files using PHP and the project page for this can be found here.

Once the data from the Excel sheet has been read, the component then saves this data to the standard articles table, "prefix_content", that is present in any Joomla! installation.

The Sections and Categories are listed by querying the "prefix_content" table so that the user can select these before the upload.

The number of rows in the Excel workbook has been limited to 150 to prevent server timeouts.

There are only a few steps to install the plugin on your Joomla 1.5 website: