Excel/CSV to Wordpress Page

[jke]

Hello all,

I’m exploring an idea to reduce workload around maintaining curriculum pages on our school website and wanted to see if anyone has tried something similar.

We currently have curriculum overviews in Excel, which then need copying and reformatting for the website. The proposal is to keep a single Excel spreadsheet in Microsoft 365 (SharePoint or OneDrive), edited only by Heads of Department, export or publish it as a view-only CSV, and have our WordPress site read that file automatically to display curriculum information for parents (filtered by year group and subject).

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who has:

• Implemented something like this in a UK school or college
• Imported curriculum data into WordPress via a public, view-only OneDrive or SharePoint link
• Used (or can recommend) a suitable WordPress plugin or workflow for this

Equally useful would be hearing about preferred alternative approaches that have worked well.

Thanks in advance — any experience related to this would be much appreciated.

 

[dhicks]

3 hours ago, jke said:

any experience related to this would be much appreciated.

 

Outside my school work, I built and maintain a site where all the site's content is contained in a folder structure of Word and Excel documents. It means the end user can very easily edit content in nice, familier tools - I handle the structure of the site, they just need to be able to edit Word / Excel files. I'm using Pandoc to convert Word files to Markdown and Excel to CSV for further processing. The files are held on a Google Drive folder and edited using Docs / Sheets, but are actually maintained as Word and Excel files just for wider compatability.

 

For Word files, for proper conversion into Markdown it's best to use the outline tools in Word (or Docs), where you use the various Headings to properly structure a document. Inside Word / Docs this makes it possible to do things like automatically create a table of contents, so it might be easier to explain to the end user like that.

 

You might need an intermediate processing script that takes a single Excel / CSV file and produces multiple files from it for placing into WordPress. If you're writing a Python script, the very widely-used Pandas library can read Excel fies, that might be the best tool for handling your data.

 

The Markdown files produced by Pandoc are being used to build a static site with a static site building tool (Jekyll / Hugo), I don't have much experience with WordPress but I would think there'd be a way to haul Markdown into WordPress.

 

Possibly useful / related is that in Google Docs (and I'd guess there's an equivilant for Microsoft O365) you can "publish" the PDF version of a Doc as a PDF just by pointing people at the appropriate URL. This means you have just one Doc file, with suitible view / edit permissions so that only your staff can edit it, but it's "published" as a PDF document that everyone (if you want) can view. Any changes people make to the Doc update the PDF - just what you want for things like policy documents, where you can have the editable version behind the scenes and a PDF version published for the public to view. I don't think I've tried the same thing with a Sheets file, although I'm guessing something similar might be possible.