A getExcel feature would provide a more business friendly way to manage data in Hugo

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While I loathe the idea of Hugo having to navigate the complexity that is Microsoft’s .*x* files, I can’t help but agree: people love Excel, and this would be a great feature.

BTW, @mjmurphy, have you tried using Google Sheet’s auto-publish feature to a CSV URL? I’ve used it for a few Hugo projects and it works great. Looks like a few people are requesting it for Excel/O365 as well.

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Thanks @rdwatters, unfortunately using external services like google sheets is not possible (would be great if they bring a similar feature to Excel/O365). I’ve gone through many different tools / processes to automate the conversion of Excel files to CSV. The constraints were that it has to work on a fairly locked down Windows environment with non technical users. The main issue I had was with “special” characters in spreadsheets and creating a UTF8 suitable CSV file for Hugo to read. Funnily enough, the most reliable solution I found was not actually using Windows, and installing Gnumeric via Windows Subsystem for Linux! (Gnumeric has a command line tool called ssconvert). However this dependency on WSL/Gnumeric felt a bit heavy, so I have recently gone back to a PowerShell module called ImportExcel (PowerShell modules can be installed by any user). Also, instead of converting to CSV, I am now converting to JSON which seems to be a more reliable format for Hugo.

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I agree that this is a pretty important addon. Simply because Excel is very popular (around 350,000 Google searches per month in the US alone). So adding Excel features to Hugo can help drive adoption.

Did you had the time already to make a GitHub feature request/discussion?

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I did not yet, @Jura, but I certainly can if @mjmurphy agrees as well. That said, my thoughts are that it’s more of a “nice to have” since converting proprietary formats into something Hugo friendly still feels a little bit outside of the Hugo scope, while I would definitely love this feature…

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I support the creation of a feature request on Github! Like @rdwatters mentioned, this might be more of an additional feature for Hugo, but probably popular. For inspiration, there is an Excel plugin for Gatsby

Does Hugo have a way to include extra features, like a module / plugin system? I know the recent release of Go had support for Modules, not sure if that means anything for Hugo.

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