Extract data fields from XML into Excel

Question

I have a huge Excel spreadsheet that contains records of Customers where each column is a field. There's a field called Demographics which contains survey results of Customers and it's entirely in XML format. That is each Customer has a survey result on their demographic info like Gender, Marital Status, Income, Age, etc. which is given in XML format. It is notable that the whole XML is like a big chunk of text in a cell of the spreadsheet which I can't use to analyze the data.

The problem is now I want to extract the demographic data of each Customer and present it as fields in the same spreadsheet, i.e., each Customer has an Age, Gender, etc. How can I do this? I have tried to Google this but it seems like nobody has the same problem. I'm using Excel 2007/2010.

Answer 1

If the XML has a flat structure like this:

you could just convert the "XML" column into an XML file and re-import it into your excel sheet. To do so, just

copy & paste the XML column into a text editor,

<customer><age>34</age><gender>m</gender></customer>
<customer><age>38</age><gender>f</gender></customer>

add a opening/closing root element,

<customers>
    <customer><age>34</age><gender>m</gender></customer>
    <customer><age>38</age><gender>f</gender></customer>
</customers>

and save as customers.xml.

Now. import it back into excel, using XML-> Import from the Developer Tools Ribbon. Based on the "flat" XML structure, Excel will create columns for the single values:

Of course this will work only if the XML structure is suitable, but if it does, it works without writing a macro or parsing the "XML" text content manually.

Answer 2

Open one of the xml form - go to file menu - share - export to excel - follow the instructions. In the export to excel you will find that, you can add all the xml forms if they are identical and export the data into one excel file in one go.