Over at Basecamp Answers, Basecamp customer Jasper van der Kolk asks, "Is the Basecamp XML export usable in Excel?"
I want to be able to export my Basecamp data on a regular basis into Excel. I want to add costs to to-do items and sum these in Excel.My question is whether the XML export can be imported in Excel easily.
Bryan Sebastian replied:
We use "exported" data from Basecamp for internal custom reporting. The XML export file that you can generate is very useful and can be imported into excel. You can use the XML source task pane to map the xml file into an excel spreadsheet and then perform a XML import. However, since the XML export file is a complete view of all your data in a hierarchical view, it can take a lot of effort, in excel, to "flatten" the information in the way you want to see it.However, if you are, or have a programmer available to you, an easier way to get you data into excel is to use the Basecamp API. You can then develop some code to "pivot" the data into a comma delimited file and the open that file up in Excel. It would not take a heavy amount of coding to do this.
Bryan has actually created a web application that "allows us to pick a project, view all task lists associated with that project and then export that information to a .csv file, which we can open in Excel." He offers more details and contact information at the Q&A page.
