Exporting a wordpress user list to a csv file and excel

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A number of people using the amr-users plugin and who are Excel users, seem to need help when it comes to importing the csv file into excel.  Open Office and Google Docs users seem to be fine. [Please note that is also possible to offer an excel file export of your user list.]

As far as I can make out, the problems some people experience with loading csv files into excel seem to be because:

  1. their hosts might have magic quotes enabled.  Ask them to disable it!
  2. their default excel csv import settings do not match the csv file settings (comma separated, and all fields double quotes delimited – this is a standard csv usage.)
  3. they do not know how to get to the text import wizard (Office 2007 in particular is non obvious)  See screenshot below.

Office 2007

In Office 2007, it seems that the trick is to rename the file to a .txt file, instead of a .csv.  Excel 2007 should then automatically load the text import wizard.  You may find other benefits to, in being able to define how excel should handle the data in each column.

Note:   When Excel opens a .csv file, it uses the current default data format settings to interpret how to import each column of data. If you want more flexibility in converting columns to different data formats, you can use the Import Text Wizard. For example, the format of a data column in the .csv file may be MDY, but Excel’s default data format is YMD, or you want to convert a column of numbers that contains leading zeros to text so you can preserve the leading zeros. To run the Import Text Wizard, you can change the file name extension from .csv to .txt before you open it…

Using the Excel Text Import Wizard:

Get the text import wizard up

  • either opening from the menus (Office 2003 – Click Data → Get External Data) or
  • by renaming file to a .txt (Offfice 2007) and then double clicking on it
  • Choose delimited, Click next
  • Choose Delimiter: comma
  • Choose text qualifier: “, Click next,
  • Other options as you wish
  • Click Finish

Other resources: