Comments for Question about Wikis

Question about Wikis

2005-09-01T22:57:35Z

I have an Excel spreadsheet of data about RSS vendors that I want to share with the world. I recently did a report for a client, in which I defined and analysed 'The RSS Space'. As part of that report, I created a spreadsheet that mapped RSS vendors to categories - with a lot of help from some brilliant minds in the VC and RSS worlds. So what I want to do is publish that vendor mapping data onto a public wiki (I have my client's permission), so that everybody can publically expand and grow it - and benefit from it.

However, I'm having problems inputting an Excel spreadsheet into a Wiki. i.e. my data has a lot of rows and columns. Does anyone know of a wiki that makes it really easy to input tabular data? And probably more importantly, makes it easy for users to edit and add to that data. Please let me know either in the comments here, or by emailing readwriteweb AT gmail.com. Thanks!

Comment from Ken Norton on 2005-09-01

2005-09-02T00:02:00Z

JotSpot allows you to convert a spreadsheet (in CSV format) to an application that anyone can edit. This is a beta feature in the current version of JotSpot. To access it, open the "Installed Applications" box in the toolbar and click "Create application from Excel".

This is just a beta version - lots of improvements (especially to the user interface :-) are planned so we welcome your feedback!

Ken
JotSpot

Comment from Michael Fagan on 2005-09-01

2005-09-02T00:52:39Z

http://numsum.com/ lets you do this I believe

Comment from Gordon on 2005-09-02

2005-09-02T10:43:19Z

Hmmm

Find a wiki that supports basic HTML (tables!) and export Excel to HTML then cut-n-paste???

Does it have to be a Wiki? If you are sharing the info then any ole web page will do surely?

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2005-09-02

2005-09-02T12:31:04Z

I've tried excel-to-html and then cutting and pasting to a wiki - but it makes it very hard for people to edit it. Which is the point of a wiki (and why a webpage won't do). I want people to edit and add to the spreadsheet data.

NumSum is interesting, but only the author of each spreadsheet can edit it. Not really truly shareable then.

JotSpot is promising, but I ran into some bugs when trying to upload my spreadsheet. The Jotspot team are looking into it...

Comment from Andrew Chen on 2005-09-02

2005-09-02T13:41:20Z

MoinMoin has a textual tabular format that uses | to delimit cells and things like that. You'd have to get some sort of custom export option from Excel to get it in the right format, but once you did, it would be pretty easy to edit the textual form in the wiki.

Comment from John Zeratsky on 2005-09-02

2005-09-02T19:00:57Z

Textile uses a similar syntax for table construction. Several wikis support Textile, but the one I use is Instiki: http://instiki.org/.

Comment from Jay Fienberg on 2005-09-02

2005-09-02T21:13:04Z

SocialText, kwiki, and Jot wikis all also support the | delimiter for tabular layout, e.g.,

|r11|r2c2|r3c3|
|r2c1|r2c2|r3c3|

You might need to export to CSV and then do some search and replace on the file, but you'll find some way to do it.

Looking forward to seeing the table!

Comment from rick gregory on 2005-09-03

2005-09-03T17:47:38Z

I needed to do this too and found csv2wp:

http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php

You have to save the Excel file as .csv and upload it (you can paste in csv too so if the upload doesn't work open the CSV file in a text editor (NOT Word) and paste away.

This works with Media Wiki, don't know about other wikis...