How to export Figma to Microsoft Excel .xlsx files using CopyDoc

Video Transcript

Today I'm going to be showing you how to export your text content from Figma into a Microsoft Excel document; we're going to be doing this by using a Figma plugin called CopyDoc.

If you haven't already done so, if you just jump into the Figma Community and search for the word "CopyDoc", and under the "Plugins" tab you'll see a result called "CopyDoc" pop-up. If you go ahead and click on the "Install" button on the right-hand side, you'll be ready to go.

You can use any Figma file that you like; at the moment, I'm just using this movie app. The only thing to bear in mind is you will need at least one frame, one Figma frame, with some text content in it for this to work. The first thing we need to do is just right-click anywhere, go down to "Plugins" and click on "CopyDoc"; that's just going to fire up the Figma plugin we just installed a second ago. I'm not going to go through any of these other features, there's other tutorials on our channel for all of these; today we're just going to be looking at exporting this Figma content into an Excel file.

To do that, we just have to click on the "Export Frames" button under the "Export Figma Frames" menu item; that's a menu item to export your Figma designs to popular document formats, including Microsoft Excel. I'm just going to click on "Export Frames", and under the drop down you can see we've got a whole bunch of different options here, and if you just click on the "Microsoft Excel (.xlxs)" option and select that, that's going to select the Microsoft Excel format for you.

There's really only a couple of options here; one option is just to include design references, that basically means that all of these frames that you select to export will also just get a little JPG file exported, just as a bit of a design reference so you can see what relates to what in the Excel file. The other option we have is to export a single Excel spreadsheet file per frame; if we leave this option unchecked, which which it is by default, this is basically going to export your Microsoft Excel file with each frame from Figma in a separate tab at the bottom of the file, and I'll show you what that looks like in just a second.

The other thing we can do is just select what frames we actually want to include in the Excel file. You can do that by either clicking on the frames in Figma and sort of filtering down that list, or you can just uncheck and check these layers manually as well. We'll just check a few in here, you can sort the frames if you wanted to sort them into a different order, you can definitely do that, you can do custom sorting, so you can actually drag drag these frames manually, but for now I'm just going to kind of leave them in a default order and do it visually by columns.

Once you've selected your frames and the ordering all you need to do is click on the "Export XLSX" button, and that's going to go ahead and export the selected frames to an Excel file. It's very quick, the export is already finished, so now we just have to click on the "Download XLSX Export" button, and I'm just going to save that to my desktop. If I now go to my desktop, you can see the zip file has popped up; I'm just going to double click on the zip file to unzip it, and we've got two different files in here; we've got a designs folder, so that was the folder I mentioned with all of our designs. These are really just JPG references that you can open up, and this is really just purely for if you're looking at the Excel file and you're not in Figma, this is just a quick way to see roughly which text relates to what frame and where it might be located on the frame; that's your design references folder.

Now we have our XLSX file as well, so I'm just going to double-click on that and that's going to open up Microsoft Excel. Just click on "Yes" for this if it pops up with this alert, it does that sometimes; you can just click "Yes" and that will open it. Just click on "View"; it does this sometimes if your Figma file has weird line breaks and different characters in it that Excel usually doesn't like, but you can just click on "View" and it'll be totally fine.

I'm just going to resize the file window so you can actually see what's going on here. You can see at the bottom here we've got all these different tabs; these are the tabs that relate to your Figma frames. The frames that we selected in the menu have all been exported and you can see here I can switch between all of them and look through all the content. These are in alphabetical order as well, so the numbers will be at the top, and it'll sort it by alphabetical order. You can very easily kind of audit the text in your frames, and if there's any duplicate text layers, if there's any text layers in your Figma file that are identical, it will automatically group those into a single layer. If your Figma frame had 20 different layers that all said "Movies", it's going to merge those into a single layer in your Excel spreadsheet, and that's just so you don't have 50 layers of the same text in there, which is which is kind of not that useful.

That's what that looks like, and I'll just show you what it looks like if we just rerun that as well in the Figma plugin. I'm just going to click on "Export Frames", and I'm just going to re-run it with the "Excel File Per Frame" option set, and just re-run the export by clicking on "Export XLSX", and that's just going to export the frame again. This time instead of exporting it to a single Excel file, if we jump back onto our desktop and open up the new zip file, you can see this time we actually have a whole bunch of different Excel files. It has split out each frame from Figma into its own Microsoft Excel file instead of merging them all into the single Excel file using the tabs at the bottom to navigate them.

Now we can open up these individually by just double clicking on them, and I'll just resize the window again, I'm not sure why it keeps going full screen, and you can see here this time we only have one tab which is just called "Figma Text", and we've got all the same text layers that we saw in our tabbed version, the original version, but this is in a single Microsoft Excel file instead. That's just an alternative option if you did need to actually split the frames out into multiple Excel files instead of just having it in the one file with the tab navigation at the bottom; there's some use cases where you would you'd probably prefer it like this, but for most of the time I'd imagine you'd probably want them all easily navigatable and searchable in a single Excel file.

Those are basically the two options that you have for exporting your text from Figma to Microsoft Excel. That's that's pretty much it; it's a very quick tutorial today just covering this one feature in the CopyDoc Figma plugin. There's obviously other formats you can export, too, which will be covered in other Figma tutorials, but today I just wanted to really quickly run through the process of exporting your content from Figma to Microsoft Excel or XLSX documents.

It's just worth being mindful of the fact that this is just using the "Export Frames" feature, and it's not actually using the "Export Text Layers" feature. Just really briefly, the difference between those two is if you do export your frames using the "Export Frames" feature to this Microsoft Excel file from Figma, you won't be able to re-import the Excel export from Figma back into Figma using the CopyDoc import feature. That's just a really important distinction between these two features; the "Export Figma Text Layers" feature, which I've covered in other tutorials on our channel, does allow you to export your text layers to CSV, JSON pr XLIFF files, and then you can actually edit those files outside of Figma and re-import them, and it will update the Figma text layers automatically. That totally works for CSV, JSON and XLIFF files, but it does not work for Excel files.

The Figma to Microsoft Excel feature is really just for using for other purposes that don't involve re-importing the text later back into Figma from Microsoft Excel. I just wanted to flag that in case you're wondering why it's not allowing you to drag and drop your Excel file back into Figma; that's the reason. If you do need to do that, I'd recommend using the other "Export Figma Text Layers" feature, and then re-importing the CSV file, for example, back in if you do need to update it. Otherwise, feel free to use the export Microsoft Excel feature if you do just need to get all of your Figma text out into a massive Excel file, and you just want to audit it, or you want to send it around for approval or something like that, then the Figma to XLSX option might actually be the one that you're looking for.

I hope that's clear; if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments and I can get back to you, but thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed this Figma tutorial if you've been wondering how to export your designs from Figma to Excel, this is a really quick way to go about it, and hopefully you can get some benefit from it in your own workflows and projects. As always, thank you for watching, and we'll be back very soon with more Figma tutorials just like this one.