#spreadsheet importer

Our developers added a nifty feature today: you can now copy data in your favorite spreadsheet program, and paste it directly into Silk to import it.

How it works:

Make sure your spreadsheet data can be understood by Silk

Select the columns you like to import in Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, or any other spreadsheet program

Hit ⌘ + c on a mac, or Ctrl + c on Linux or Windows to copy the data to your clipboard

Go to your Silk dashboard, go to the ‘Add a collection of datacards’ section, and hit 'Paste spreadsheet’

Click in the text box, and hit ⌘ + v on a mac, or Ctrl + v on Linux or Windows to paste in the data

Hit 'Import’, and import your spreadsheet as you normally would

As of today, everyone can use the new spreadsheet importer! The spreadsheet (or CSV) importer is an important tool for many users, so we gave it some much needed love. The end-result is a faster and super stable importer, with added features which give you more control over how your pages will end up looking on your Silk site.

We think this upgrade caters to power- and casual users alike. It’s easier to quickly create a few pages from a simple spreadsheet, and we have added more advanced features under the hood.

As you can see in the video above, the importer displays an exact preview of how your Silk pages will end up like.

The gear icons let you fine-tune several things, like splitting values separated by commas. New features are the ability to create custom links, to disambiguate duplicate page names, and more.

When you start a Silk site you can begin from scratch, but you might already have some data lying around. If this is the case, Silk makes your life a bit easier by offering the CSV Importer. This tool can automatically create a page for every row in a spreadsheet.

You can use this for your own spreadsheets or for publicly available datasets. The only caveat is that your spreadsheet must be exported as a CSV file. CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. It is the most common and easy way to format rows of data. Every well known spreadsheet program can export to this file format.

Today, we launched a thoroughly improved version of the CSV importer. It gives you a preview of how each imported page will look, and has many options to manipulate your data.

The importer has a dynamic preview: you can make changes by clicking the little pencils. For instance, you can remove a tag, or create a new Silk page from a tag. If you have URLs in your spreadsheet that point to an image, you can let Silk import that image. If you like, you can preview your changes on every page before you hit import.