Can’t get urls to import as links

  • Resolved jivyb

    (@jivyb)


    8 years, 5 months ago

    I have a test xls file that has lots of urls in it. I have attached the url extension to tablepress and imported the document and tried a few different options and the urls are still importing as plain text. I read in another thread that the links in the xls doc have to be formatted as html. As far as I can tell they are. Excel recognizes them as links and if you open it in Excel and click on them Excel opens it in a browser.

    I’ve switched off all other plugins and changed to the 2016 theme, turned on wp debug, and checked the console with errors. None of these things helped, so I’m back to wondering if the file isn’t connecting w/ the url extension properly.

    Can you look at the file and see why it’s not importing correctly?

    https://valerierobinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Calendar.xlsx

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Thread Starter jivyb

    (@jivyb)

    I have tested a lot of ways to do this and have found that the best is to use Excel and save as HTML. Then that will give you your file_name.xlsx and a folder. Inside the folder is sheet.xlsx. Open that in a text editor and delete everything above the <table> and below </table> HTML tags so it’s just the table in HTML. Then using TablePress, you can import that html and it will keep the links as you had them entered in Excel.

    Hope that helps someone. It’s much faster to do the HTML import if you have a lot of URLS than the other options: keying them in as HTML in TablePress or using an Excel macro to pull the urls into a new column so you have your link text in one column and the url in the next column. Just looks kludgy that way.

    Plugin Author Tobias B?thge

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble.

    The root cause here indeed is that Excel links are not HTML code. Your workaround is a very good one for this! Thanks for sharing!

    The mentioned Extension should work for plain URLs, as those will be made clickable – but only on output of the table, i.e. not during the import or when viewing the table’s “Edit” screen.

    Regards,
    Tobias

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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