Written on 29 Mar 2023

Will I ever use a desktop spreadsheet app again?

Maybe I can finally ditch LibreOffice entirely now that I know Observable has Excel file support

I love Observable notebooks, I use them all the time. The tool is the first thing I reach for when I have data.

Except when the data comes in an Excel file format, which tons of government data files do.

And at that point I have to reach for Excel LibreOffice just to turn a file I downloaded into a CSV, which I can upload into a notebook.

Or at least that's what I was doing before I stumbled across this notebook showing support for .xlsx files. The notebook looks like it was originally created in late January so I must've just missed it somehow.

I'm particularly excited for when I have multiple Excel files, for example when there is one file per year, because I'll be able to use code to transform and clean the data without having to convert them all to .csv files first.

Thanks Observable team! Keep up the great work.