Data layout in Excel spreadsheets

Although Excel is deprecated as a format because it is proprietary to Microsoft and somewhat unpredictable, Freecargo's EDI interface will parse Excel spreadsheets.

Excel is not an easy format to handle, but CargoOffice tries to parse them anyway. If you want to use excel, then keep a few things in mind: Excel documents may not contain macro's. Newer versions of Microsoft Excel may not always work. Don't save documents in 'docX' format, use 'xls'. Excel has the option 'save as CSV', so a excel document can be saved as a csv-file; this can always be used in CargoOffice.

The data layout is comparable to the one in csv files as described in standard CSV.

• The first row will contain field definitions, an empty cell is considered a terminator for this header row.
• All following rows will contain the corresponding data.
• An example can be found here.

• To avoid mentioned compatibility problems it is advisable to export such a spreadsheet as CSV file (a standard Excel function) and send that rather than the Excel spreadsheet itself.
• Please note that the XLS parser is provided 'as is' and no additional support will be given to the handling of Excel spreadsheets.
• The problem with Excel files is that they are not machine created files, but human created files. Therefor we expect all inserted data inside the Excel form to be manually checked before the files are sent to cargoOffice.
• For detailed information on the content see the description of the CSV format.