Best ways to access Excel data via API to display on a frontend

Hi everyone, nice to be here!

I saw Cole’s recent video regarding n8n, supabase and Excel and found it really interesting for future projects but I am wondering if it is overkill for a current project I have now with the client.

They asked me to build a frontend but then later told me they have no API for me to use.
Meanwhile their data is stored in Excel spreadsheets and they do not want to migrate to a postgresql db yet…

What are the best ways to resolve this conflict?
i.e. I want a clean API and they want to stay on Excel

I was wondering if Cole’s approach in the video is the way to go for this use case or if it is overkill.

Other ideas that came to mind were to ask them to use Airtable or an open source alternative like Nocodb or Baserow although I have no experience with any open source Airtable alternatives to know which are any good.

Thanks for your help!

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That’s too bad they aren’t down to move to Postgres… seems like if they are stuck to Excel you’ll need to not necessarily migrate the data to Postgres but create a sync between Excel and Postgres so you can at least have a database to use with the frontend.

For that this process in the video you linked would work well! Though you wouldn’t want to create a RAG knowledgebase if you just want the raw Excel data just in a DB. But you can use a lot of the same concepts to create a similar workflow to periodically read from an Excel spreadsheet (or multiple) and update a Postgres DB to keep the data synced.

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