Excel Import
Excel Import turns an existing harness spreadsheet into a structured Wiring Studio project. Drop in an Excel workbook and an AI agent reads it, discovers the data, and builds out a sheet for you — creating components, wiring connections, cables, connector cavities, pin assignments, and lengths. It is the fastest way to bring a harness you already document in Excel into the app without re-entering everything by hand.
Info
Excel Import is a Beta feature. It pulls out as much as it can and keeps improving over time. Results depend on how thoroughly your spreadsheet documents the harness.
From Spreadsheet to Live Harness
Most harness designs start their life in a spreadsheet. It works — until it doesn't. Pin and cavity tables drift out of sync with the wiring list. The bill of materials gets re-typed by hand every revision. Nothing validates that a wire actually connects two real cavities, so copy-paste errors slip through between versions. Wire colors, gauges, and lengths end up scattered across columns and cell fills. And a spreadsheet can never show you the harness — there is no schematic, no formboard, no drawing to check your work against.
Excel Import is the bridge. You keep the spreadsheet you already maintain, and the agent reconstructs it as a connected project: components you can place, wiring you can trace pin-to-pin, a BOM that recalculates itself, and a Design View you can lay out. Instead of rebuilding your harness from scratch, you start from where you already are.
Starting an Import
- 1
Go to the Projects page and click Import Excel
- 2
The Import from Excel dialog opens
- 3
Drag a spreadsheet onto the drop zone, or click to browse and pick a file
- 4
Supported formats are .xlsx, .xls, and .xlsm
- 5
Once the file uploads, the dialog closes and the import runs in the background
You can close the dialog and keep working while the agent builds your
project — the import does not block the app. If you pick a file that
isn't a spreadsheet, the dialog warns you to choose an
.xlsx
spreadsheet and waits for a valid file.
What Gets Imported
The agent reconstructs the structured parts of your harness from whatever the spreadsheet documents:
- Components — Connectors (with cavity counts and cavity labels), splices, diodes, and resistors, along with part numbers and manufacturer data
- Wiring connections — Pin-to-pin wires with optional wire part numbers, signal and network names, and twisted pairs
- Pin configuration — Contact part assignments, wire seals, and pin descriptions per cavity (see Pin Configuration)
- Cables — Lengths in metric or imperial units, coverings, segments, and shielded or multi-conductor cables with per-strand connections (see Cable Shielding)
- Wire colors and marking — Color codes read from cell background fills, plus heat-shrink color parts (see Wire Colors and Marking)
- Mechanical accessories — Boots, backshells, locks, covers, and grommets attached to components
- Project settings — Measurement units, cutlist multiplier, price multiplier, and marker length (see Project Settings)
No Template Required
There is no template to fill in and no required column order. The agent is LLM-driven, so it reads your spreadsheet's actual layout and discovers the structure on its own. It recognizes headers like Connector, From, To, Gauge, Length, and Color, infers relationships from description and reference columns, and reads wire color codes from the background fills you already use.
It also handles workbooks that hold more than one harness. A single file might keep each harness on its own worksheet, group several sheets together, or place multiple harnesses as regions within one sheet. The agent detects those boundaries and extracts each harness into its own project sheet. The number of sheets is capped to your plan's sheet limit; if a workbook contains more harnesses than your plan allows, the extra ones are folded into the last sheet.
Watching Progress
Because the import runs in the background, progress appears in a floating import dock rather than blocking the screen. The dock shows the current phase, running counts of what has been created, and a streaming feed of each step as the agent works through your file.
You can keep editing other projects, or dismiss the dock while the import keeps running.
Layout and What to Expect
A spreadsheet carries no drawing, so the importer cannot reproduce a formboard you never had. Instead it makes a best guess at the layout, arranging components by how they connect and packing the result into a clean starting point. You then refine the positions in the Design View the same way you would on any project.
Info
The more your spreadsheet documents — pin assignments, wire colors, cable groupings, and part numbers — the more complete the import. A sparse list still imports, but with less detail to reconstruct.
If an Import Fails
If something goes wrong, the import surfaces a short, plain-language message for the phase it failed in rather than a raw error, and the project is left ready for another attempt. You can retry the import, and you can dismiss or hide a running import at any time without stopping it.
Tip
If an import comes back thinner than expected, open the source spreadsheet and check that pin assignments, part numbers, and wire colors are actually written down — the agent can only reconstruct what the sheet records.
Tips for a Clean Import
- Include part numbers — Manufacturer and part-number columns let the agent match real components instead of placeholders
- Label pin and cavity assignments — Explicit From/To cavities produce accurate pin-to-pin wiring
- Mark twisted pairs explicitly — Note differential pairs (for example CAN-H / CAN-L) in the sheet rather than relying on physical grouping
- Use cell fills for wire colors — Background-colored cells are read as wire color codes
- Give positive cable lengths — Real lengths feed the cut list; blank or zero lengths are left unset
Once the import finishes, continue in Getting Started to learn the editor, lay out the harness in the Design View, refine connectivity in Pin Configuration, and review the auto-generated BOM and Cut List.