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Importing data

Most spreadsheets come in without a question. When one does not, it is nearly always one of the things on this page, and nearly always something you can fix in the file in a minute.

One thing worth knowing first: your file is read in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded while BroadPaper works out what is in it. You see what it found before anything is saved, and when you press Bring it in only the rows and columns are sent to your workspace — the file itself never leaves your computer. It also means that if something goes wrong while reading, closing the message and trying again costs nothing.

What you can bring in

• Excel workbooks (.xlsx). Every sheet with data in it is offered. Dates Excel stores as dates come in as dates, and a cell with a formula comes in as the value Excel last calculated for it.
• CSV and tab-separated files (.csv, .tsv, .txt). The separator is worked out from the contents: commas, tabs, semicolons and vertical bars (|) all work, and values wrapped in double quotes may contain the separator or a line break.
• JSON (.json) and newline-delimited JSON (.ndjson, .jsonl). See JSON files.
• Rows copied from a spreadsheet and pasted in. See Pasting rows.

BroadPaper decides what a file is from what is inside it, not from its name, so a .csv that is really tab-separated, or a .txt exported from Excel, reads perfectly well.

These are not read:

• Older Excel workbooks (.xls) and password-protected workbooks — see below.
• OpenDocument (.ods) and Apple Numbers (.numbers) files. Export them as Excel or CSV first: in Numbers, File → Export To → Excel; in LibreOffice, File → Save As and choose Excel 2007-365.
• A link to a Google Sheet, pasted in. Choose the sheet from Google Drive instead — see Google Drive and OneDrive — or download it with File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).
• PDFs, Word documents and images.

Google Drive and OneDrive

If the spreadsheet is kept in Google Drive or OneDrive, press Google Drive or OneDrive under the drop zone rather than downloading it first. Google Sheets, Excel workbooks, CSV and JSON files can all be chosen, and a Microsoft work or school account works as well as a personal one.

The file is still read in your own browser. You sign in to Google or Microsoft in their own window and choose the file in their own file picker; the file then comes down into your browser and is read exactly as a file you dropped in would be. From Google, BroadPaper asks only to read the files you choose — not the rest of your Drive. From Microsoft, it asks for permission to read the files your account can open in OneDrive and SharePoint (Files.Read.All), and uses it only to download the file you pick, and again when you press Refresh. It does not keep your Google or Microsoft sign-in: it lasts until you close the tab.

Refreshing from the file

Data brought in this way remembers the file it came from. Next month, update the spreadsheet where it is, open the data in BroadPaper and press Refresh. The rows are read again from the file, and every design using the data uses them from then on.

• Your choices are kept. A column you switched off, or gave a different type, stays that way as long as its heading in the file stays the same — and designs go on finding it.
• A refresh replaces the rows. Anything changed with Edit the data is replaced by what is in the file, so make a lasting change in the file itself.
• You are asked first when a design would print differently: a column that is no longer in the file, a column whose values no longer fit what it holds, or a file that has grown past your plan's row limit. Otherwise the refresh just happens.
• A workbook with several sheets is refreshed from the sheet you chose, found by its name. Renaming that sheet stops a refresh from finding it.
• To stop refreshing, choose Stop refreshing from it from the menu beside Refresh. The data stays as it is.
• A refresh uses the account of whoever presses it. A colleague who can't open the file in Google Drive or OneDrive can't refresh from it either. In Google Drive, BroadPaper is allowed only the files each person has chosen themselves, so a colleague who can open the file is told BroadPaper can't open it the first time they press Refresh: Choose the file again once, and after that Refresh works for them too.

When it doesn't work

• “BroadPaper can't open” the file. It has been deleted or moved somewhere you can't reach, or you are signed in to a different Google or Microsoft account. Press Choose the file again and pick it wherever it is now.
• “Your browser stopped the Google Drive sign-in window from opening.” (or the same for OneDrive) Allow pop-ups for this site in your browser's address bar — most browsers show a button for it at the end of the bar — then try again.
• “OneDrive needs you to confirm one more step.” The first time, Microsoft can ask two questions in two windows, and a browser lets one click open one window. Press Continue.
• A Google Sheet is “too large for Google to hand over as a spreadsheet”. Google only converts Sheets up to a size of its own choosing. In Google Sheets, use File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) and drop that file in instead.
• “Microsoft sign-in didn't finish.” with a work or school account. Some organisations let only their administrator allow a new application. Ask yours to allow BroadPaper to read files in OneDrive and SharePoint, or download the file and drop it in.

How much you can bring in

A file can have up to 200 columns. Anything beyond that is left out, because no document can sensibly use it.

The file is too big

The size is checked before the file is read, so nothing has happened yet. Workbooks are often far bigger than the data in them: other sheets, charts, pictures, pivot tables and formatting all take room.

Not all of my rows came in

BroadPaper reads a file up to your plan's rows in one set of data and stops there. When it stops, the screen says so before you bring anything in:

If you bring it in anyway, the set of data holds only those rows, and every document made from it is missing the rest. Once it is saved, Show the [number] rows on the data's own screen lists every row that did come in.

My workspace is full

When you already have as many sets of data as your plan holds, Bring in data shows You have reached your plan's limit instead of the drop zone. Deleting a set of data you no longer use makes room straight away. Designs that used it keep their layout and ask for data again, and documents already made are not affected.

If a new set of data would take you past your storage, bringing it in stops with:

“We couldn't read this file.”

This is what you see for a file in the old Excel format, which BroadPaper does not read. These produce it:

• a workbook saved as .xls (Excel 97–2003), which some accounting and banking systems still export;
• a file or a paste with nothing in it, where the hint about Excel does not apply — see Empty files;
• a password-protected workbook — Excel stores an encrypted workbook in that same older container, whatever its name says;
• occasionally an .xlsx file that was renamed from an .xls.

Some systems export a file called .xls that is really a web page or XML underneath. BroadPaper reads that as text, and you will see one or two columns of angle brackets rather than your data. The fix is the same: open it in Excel and save it as .xlsx.

Workbooks that will not open

The file is a zip archive — which is what every modern spreadsheet format is inside — but not an Excel workbook. The usual causes are an OpenDocument (.ods) or Apple Numbers file, or a Word document or zip archive that was renamed. Export it from the program that made it as Excel (.xlsx) or CSV.

A workbook is compressed, and these are safety checks made before it is unpacked. They exist to stop a file that would take your browser down with it, including files built to do exactly that. An ordinary workbook of figures is nowhere near either limit; one carrying thousands of embedded objects, or a very large pivot cache, can be. Copy the cells you need into a new workbook with Paste Special → Values and save that, or save the sheet as CSV.

The workbook is damaged or was written by a program that does something unusual with the format. A CSV export from that program nearly always works.

A workbook that opens, with blanks where values should be

• Formulas. BroadPaper reads the value Excel last calculated. A workbook generated by another system that was never opened in Excel may have no calculated values stored at all. Open it in Excel, let it calculate, and save it.
• Merged cells. A merged range keeps its value in the first cell only, so the rest read as empty. Unmerge the cells and fill the value into each row.

Empty files

A CSV, text or JSON file with nothing in it but spaces and line breaks — or an empty paste — stops with We couldn't read this file., the same message as an older Excel workbook, so its hint about saving as .xlsx does not apply. Check you exported the file you meant to, and that the export finished.

Every sheet is empty. This happens when a workbook's cells are formulas pointing at another workbook, when the data lives on a sheet that only holds a chart, or when the wrong copy of a file was chosen. Empty sheets in an otherwise full workbook are simply skipped.

When BroadPaper can read a file but finds nothing to bring in, the screen says so before anything is saved:

That is a row of headings with nothing underneath them. When there are not even headings, the same note is headed There's nothing in this to bring in.

£ signs, accents or names look wrong

If a £ shows as �, an accented name like Zoë or Müller has a � in it, or a column of money came in as plain numbers, the file is a CSV saved in an older Windows text encoding. BroadPaper reads text files as UTF-8, which is what every current system writes, and characters saved the older way do not survive being read as UTF-8.

My columns are called Column 1, Column 2

BroadPaper looks at the first row that has anything in it and decides whether it is headings or data. It treats it as headings when its cells are short pieces of text and the columns beneath look different — numbers, dates or money under a text heading. When it cannot tell, it numbers the columns instead, and your heading row appears as the first row of data. Before you bring the file in, the screen says:

That happens most often when:

• there are rows above the headings — a report title, a date range, a company name, notes — so the first row is mostly empty;
• headings are numbers or dates, such as 2025 and 2026, or months stored as real dates;
• every column is text, and a heading word also appears as a value further down;
• most of the heading cells are blank.

Your headings are kept as you wrote them — Total Fees (£) stays Total Fees (£) — and that is how columns are named in the designer and the matching screen. The exception is a heading written all in capitals, joined with underscores or dots, or runTogetherLikeThis, which is tidied into ordinary words: TOTAL_FEES becomes Total fees and clientName becomes Client name, while abbreviations such as VAT stay in capitals. Two columns with the same heading are both kept.

Dates

A column is read as dates when one of these forms accounts for almost all of its values:

Two-digit years (31/08/26) and dates with a weekday in front (Mon 31 Aug 2026) are not recognised, and a column that mixes several forms comes in as text. Either way the dates still print, exactly as they were written, but they cannot be reformatted.

Day first or month first

03/04/2026 is 3 April in the UK and March 4 in the United States. BroadPaper decides this once for the whole column, never date by date, so a column can never end up with some dates read one way and some the other. If any date in the column has a number above 12 in either of the first two positions, that settles it. If none does, the column is read day first, and before you bring the file in the screen says so:

How dates look in a document is a separate choice, made in How it will look: 12 September 2026, 12 Sep 2026, 12/09/2026, September 2026 or 2026-09-12. A date is kept as a calendar date, so it never slips to the day before in another time zone.

Numbers and codes

Numbers can be written with thousands separators (1,234.56), a plus or minus sign, or in brackets for a negative, as accounts do: (1,234.56) is minus 1,234.56.

A comma as the decimal point is not read as a number. 12,5 and 1.234,56 come in as text. BroadPaper does not guess here, because 1,234 means one thousand two hundred and thirty-four in nearly every file, and a guess that sometimes made it 1.234 would be wrong about money. Change the number format in your spreadsheet to use a full stop for the decimal point before exporting, or bring in the workbook, where numbers are stored as numbers.

References and codes stay as they are

These are kept as text, so they print exactly as you wrote them:

• anything containing letters: INV-10241, AB12 3CD, SKU 4471;
• anything with leading zeros: 00442, 07700 900123 — a number would lose the zeros;
• plain digits under a heading that names a reference: ID, Ref, Reference, Number, No, Code, SKU, Account, Invoice, Postcode, Zip, Phone, Tel, Mobile, VAT, NI, ISBN.

If a column of reference numbers still came in as A number — say, customer numbers under the heading Customer — change What it holds to Text on the review screen.

A few odd values in a column of numbers

A column is read as numbers when at least 19 in every 20 of its values are numbers. The few that are not — an n/a, a TBC, a dash — are printed as blanks. If more of the column than that is not a number, the whole column comes in as text. Show the [number] rows on the data's screen shows exactly what each row will print.

Money and percentages

A column is read as money when at least half its values carry the same currency, written either way:

• a symbol — £, $, €, ¥, ₹, CHF, R$, kr, zł;
• or a code before or after the figure — GBP 1,200, 1,200 USD.

With no symbol in the values, a code or symbol in the heading does the same job: Fees (GBP) or Amount £. The symbol is decoration — the value kept is the number, and the document adds the currency back when it prints it.

A column of plain numbers under a heading like Total comes in as A number, and a column that mixes currencies comes in as plain numbers too, because a column has one currency. Change What it holds to Money on the review screen and choose the currency there.

Percentages

A column is a percentage when at least half its values have a % sign, or when its heading says rate, yield, margin, growth, change, share, allocation, weight or percent. In a column with no signs:

• values all between −1 and 1 are read as fractions: 0.125 prints as 12.5%;
• larger values are read as percentage points: 12.5 prints as 12.5%.

Empty columns

A column that is empty in every row is switched off — its Use box is unticked on the review screen — so it does not clutter every list of fields. Tick it if you plan to fill it in later. A column empty in more than half its rows says so, because a document using it will print a blank wherever there is no value. Completely empty rows are skipped.

Workbooks with several sheets

When a workbook has more than one sheet with data in it, BroadPaper asks Which sheet? and shows each one's rows, columns and first few headings. One set of data is one sheet. To use two sheets, bring the workbook in twice and choose a different sheet each time; each counts as a set of data on your plan. Sheets with nothing in them are not offered.

JSON files

BroadPaper reads the shapes exports actually come in:

• a list of records;
• a list wrapped in an object, such as data, items, results or records — when an object holds more than one list, one with one of those names is used;
• a single object, which becomes one row;
• one record per line (NDJSON).

{ "data": [
  { "invoice": "INV-10241", "client": { "name": "Aldermead Ltd" }, "total": 2442.00 }
] }

Objects inside a record become columns with a combined heading — client.name above becomes a column called Client name — up to four levels deep. Lists inside a record are left out, because a column cannot hold a list.

The file is not valid JSON — often a trailing comma, a missing bracket, or a file that was cut short. Exported JSON from a system is usually fine; JSON edited by hand is where this comes from. A file that is valid JSON but holds neither an object nor a list of records — a single number or a piece of text — says We couldn't read this file as JSON. Check that it contains an object, or a list of records.

Pasting rows

Select the cells in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers — including the heading row — copy them, paste them into Or paste your rows, and press Read what I pasted. Spreadsheets copy cells as tab-separated text, which is exactly what BroadPaper expects, and they copy what the cells show: £1,234.00 and 31/08/2026 rather than the underlying number, both of which are read correctly.

Pasting is a good way round a file that is too big to choose, or a CSV with an encoding problem. The file size limit does not apply to a paste; the row limit for your plan does, and BroadPaper takes at most 32 MB of rows in one go. A paste is called Pasted data until you give it a name.

Typing data in

No spreadsheet to hand? On Bring in data, under Or type it in, press Type it in. A design started from an empty page that has no data yet offers the same thing as Type your data in, and the data you save is connected to that design.

It opens a table to fill in, called My data until you rename it, with two columns to start — Item and Amount — and a few empty rows. Give each column a heading, choose what it holds underneath the heading (the same choices as Checking what came in), and type the rows. Column adds a column and Add a row a row. Rows copied out of a spreadsheet can be pasted into any cell, and they fill across and down from there.

• A cell is only text until you save. What you type is kept exactly as you typed it, so nothing is lost while a column's type is still wrong. A cell that does not fit what its column holds — words in a money column, a date BroadPaper cannot read — is outlined in red, a note above the table says how many there are, and Save takes you to the first one rather than saving. Changing what a column holds reads again what is already typed in it, and leaves anything that does not fit as it was.
• Percentages are typed as per cent. In a percentage column, 20 and 20% both mean 20%, and the table shows 20%.
• Dates have a date picker, and a Yes or no column a choice of the two. Dates pasted in, or already in a column you change to a date, are read day first: 31/08/2026.
• Empty rows are left out. A row with nothing in it is not saved, so you never get a blank line in a table from a spare row.
• Every column needs a heading, and there needs to be at least one row, before the table can be saved. Your plan's rows in one set of data apply here as they do to a file.

Closing the tab with changes you have not saved asks first.

Changing data you brought in

One wrong figure does not mean bringing the whole file in again. On the data's own screen press Edit the data, or Edit data in the bar at the top of a design that uses it. It is the same table, with every row you brought in: change any cell, add or remove rows and columns, and press Save. Until then nothing changes; afterwards every design using the data shows the change.

• Renaming a column keeps it connected. Designs find a column by a name fixed when it was made, not by its heading, so changing Amt to Amount does not disconnect the table that shows it.
• Removing a column removes its values when you save. A design that showed it prints a blank there, and its Fields screen lets you choose something else — see Matching fields to a design.
• Saving replaces the whole set of data with what is in the table, so what you see when you press Save is exactly what documents made from it print.

Data that refreshes from Google Drive or OneDrive says so above the table. Your changes last only until the next Refresh, which reads the rows from the file again and replaces them. To keep a change, make it in the file as well.

Checking what came in

After you bring data in you land on its review screen. Each column shows what BroadPaper decided it holds, and — the part worth looking at — its first value as it will print, with the value as BroadPaper stored it underneath whenever the two differ. That stored value is the plain number or date, not necessarily how your file wrote it: 12.5% in your file is stored as 0.125 and prints as 12.5%, and £482,310.40 is stored as 482310.4. You see that here before any document uses it.

• What it holds — Text, A number, Money, A percentage, A date, A date and time, Yes or no, or A web address.
• How it will look — the date format, or the currency (GBP, USD, EUR, AUD, BRL, CAD, CHF, DKK, HKD, INR, JPY, NOK, NZD, PLN, SEK, SGD or ZAR).
• Use — whether the column is offered to designs at all.

Press Save changes when you have changed something. Changing what a column holds re-reads every row, so it takes a moment on a large set of data, and designs pick the change up the next time you open them. Show the [number] rows lists every row, fifty at a time, formatted the way a document will print it.

Matching fields to a design

A starter design — an invoice, a quote, a statement — needs particular things: a client name, an invoice date, the line amounts. When you point it at your data, BroadPaper matches each of those to one of your columns by itself, and asks you only about the ones where it is genuinely not sure. On an ordinary spreadsheet it asks nothing.

It asks even when one column looks like a strong match if another looks almost as strong. Three money columns that could each be the total is exactly where picking one would quietly put the wrong figure on somebody's invoice.

To see or change what fills each field, open the design and press Fields. On that screen:

• Change beside any field — including the ones BroadPaper was sure about — picks a different column, and each option shows a real value from your data;
• a field your spreadsheet has nothing for can be typed in instead: a VAT rate of 20 is read as 20%;
• a field can be left blank;
• Start again forgets your choices and matches the data afresh.

If a choice saved earlier no longer makes sense for the data — a VAT rate pointed at a column of unit prices — the design says BroadPaper has left it out rather than print a figure it does not believe. and links to the screen that fixes it. A design started from an empty page has nothing to match: its fields are your columns.

No spreadsheet at all? A starter design can have its details typed in: open it and choose Type the details in. What you type is saved as an ordinary set of data you can edit and reuse.

Want to see the shape first? A starter design that has no data yet offers Download a sample spreadsheet: a CSV of the design's own example figures, with one row per line and the single details — the customer, the date, the reference — repeated on every row. Its headings are the design's field names, so bringing it straight back in fills every field with nothing to ask. Keep the headings, replace the rows with your own, and bring it in.

Several documents in one file

A file with a row per invoice line for several customers maps perfectly onto an invoice — and produces one invoice with the first customer's name above everybody's lines. So when a column holds several different values that look like separate documents, the matching screen asks Is this one document, or several? and offers to split the file, one document per customer, per job or per whatever the column holds.

• The split can be changed from the design itself, in the bar along the top, where you can also step through each document one at a time to check it.
• If a design is not split but its data looks as if it should be, the design says Your data may hold more than one document.
• Making the documents from a split design asks what you want: separate files (one per document, each counting against your month), all of them in one file, or just the one on screen. See Making documents.