Import & Export
Wafflebase reads and writes the file formats your team already uses, so you can bring existing work in and take finished work out. Nothing is locked to the platform.
At a glance
| Product | Import | Export |
|---|---|---|
| Sheets | Excel (.xlsx), CSV/TSV, JSON/JSONL, Parquet | — (CSV/JSON via CLI) |
| Docs | Word (.docx) | Word (.docx), PDF (.pdf), Markdown (.md), plain text (.txt) |
| Slides | PowerPoint (.pptx) | PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF (.pdf) |
| Notes | — (Markdown via CLI) | — (Markdown via CLI) |
| Board | Miro board (via Import from Miro…) | — |
Upload (.pdf) | — (view-only) |
Import always creates a new document; it never overwrites an open one. Export downloads a file from the document you are editing. Notes have no in-app import or export — a note's content is its Markdown, and it moves in and out through wafflebase notes import / notes export.
Importing files
There is one entry for every format. From your workspace, open the New menu and choose Upload files…, or drag files straight onto the documents list. You can select several at once; each file is read and turned into the matching document type based on its extension:
| You upload | You get |
|---|---|
.xlsx | A spreadsheet — each sheet in the workbook becomes a tab. Values, formulas, and basic cell formatting are brought across. |
.csv, .tsv, .json, .jsonl, .ndjson, .parquet | A spreadsheet with a single tab holding the parsed rows. |
.docx | A document, mapping paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, and inline formatting into the editor. |
.pptx | A deck: slides, text boxes, shapes, images, tables, and theme colors become native Wafflebase elements. |
.pdf | A PDF document you can read and comment on. The file is kept intact and viewed as-is rather than converted — see Viewing PDFs. |
.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .webp | An image document you can view and download again — see Viewing Images. |
| anything else | A stored file with no preview, which you can download again from its header. |
A panel in the bottom-right corner shows per-file progress while each file is parsed and any embedded images are uploaded into your workspace. An uploaded file is capped at 50 MB, and an image document at 25 MB. Images lifted out of a .docx or .pptx are a separate limit — they go to the workspace image store, which accepts 10 MB per image.
A very large .csv or .tsv usually stops at an import budget (40,000 cells, plus an overall size ceiling) rather than failing: the sheet is created from the rows that arrived, and a toast on the documents list says how many were kept. The exception is a file whose very first row already busts a budget — there is nothing to truncate down to, so the import fails with an error instead.
.parquet is held to the same 40,000-cell limit, but it is never truncated: the row and column counts are checked before anything is read and an over-limit file is rejected outright. .xlsx, .json and .jsonl have no cell budget.
The Import from Miro… entry in the same menu is separate — it reads a Miro board through Miro's API rather than a file on disk, and creates a board from it.
Exporting files
Docs
In the document editor, open the Export menu (the download icon in the header) and choose:
- Word (
.docx) — the full document, including tables and headers/footers. - PDF (
.pdf) — a paginated, print-ready PDF that mirrors the on-screen page layout. - Markdown (
.md) — GitHub-Flavoured Markdown. Deliberately lossy: headings, lists, tables, links, images, bold, italic and strikethrough survive; alignment, indent, line spacing, colour, font choice and size, underline, super/subscript, merged and nested table cells, and headers/footers do not. Link and image targets are checked on the way out — anything that is not an ordinary web address (or, for an image, embedded image data) is dropped, leaving the text it wrapped behind. - Plain text (
.txt) — the text only, one block per line, with table rows tab-separated. All formatting is dropped.
Slides
In the presentation editor, open the Export menu and choose:
- PowerPoint (
.pptx) — an editable deck with slides, shapes, text, images, tables, and the theme preserved as DrawingML. - PDF (
.pdf) — one slide per page, ready to share or print.
Sheets
Spreadsheets export to CSV or JSON through the command-line tool (wafflebase sheets …). A built-in download menu in the grid editor is on the roadmap.
Fidelity notes
Wafflebase aims for a faithful round-trip, but the source formats are large and some constructs have no exact equivalent:
- PPTX/DOCX import is best-effort. Common content — text, lists, tables, shapes, images, and theme colors — converts cleanly. Rare or application-specific features (embedded objects, macros, exotic effects) may be simplified or dropped.
- Fonts referenced by an imported file must be available in Wafflebase to render identically; otherwise a close fallback is substituted.
- Re-exporting a file you imported will not be byte-identical to the original, but preserves the structure and content faithfully.
Automating with the CLI
Every import/export path above is also scriptable. See the CLI reference for docs export, docs import, slides export, slides import, notes export, notes import, and the sheets cell import/export commands — useful for batch conversions and pipelines.