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Excel to chatbot template

Do you have a list of questions and answers you want the bot to use in an Excel file? You can easily transform your Excel into a fully-functional bot 

Reuse your existing list of QA to speed up the bot development process. Here we help you to easily use Excel to prepare your Q&A and turn into a fully-functional bot with our service. Of course, we can also work with whatever Excel/CSV/Airtable file you already have if you prefer not to use our template.

So, let’s see how to use our Excel template to define your bot to start the process. Start by downloading the file. Click on this link to automatically download the Excel template for chatbots (if it doesn’t download, try the “Save link as” option, available on the right-click menu).

Open it with Microsoft Excel 365 (recommended) and let the fun begin!. 

A first look at the template

Activate the macros

The template comes with some macros that help detect some errors when defining your chatbot. Make sure you click on “Enable Content” if asked to do so

Chatbot XLS template macros

Question topic structure

Each question topic the chatbot can answer is defined in two columns:

  • Questions column: The possible alternative wordings visitors can use when trying to ask this question topic
  • Answer column: The answer to be provided by the bot when detecting the visitor is asking this question

The Information column will warn you of possible errors in the topic definition

Chatbot XLS template macros

Questions with parameters

To simplify the creation of question topics that cover a broad range of possible questions, you can use parameters. See the image on the right for an example. Parameters are indicated with the ‘$’ sign (as “$language” in the example). Thanks to this parameter, you don’t need to replicate all the possible question examples for each language (or whatever concept in your bot) your visitors may be asking for. If you’re using a parameter that does not exist, the template will complain.

The possible values that a parameter can take are defined in the Vocabulary sheet. For each parameter, you can list the values including possible synonyms for each value.

Chatbot template with parameters
Chatbot Excel template with vocabularies

Template sheets

Your Excel file can have several sheets. At the very least there will be two sheets:

  • A Q&A sheet with the list of questions and answers the bot must know
  • A Vocabulary sheet with the list of values to be used (optionally) to define more flexible questions 

You can add more sheets before the Vocabulary one to group your questions in additional categories. If you do so, the generated bot will start by asking the visitor what is her question about

chatbot template question groups

Defining your own bot

If you understood how the template works (remember the template itself comes with useful information), the only thing  you need to do is to:

  1. Replace the template sample contents with your own topics, question, answers and (optionally) vocabulary.
  2. Check there are no warnings signaling possible errors
  3. Save the file and send it to us!

Of course, feel free to reach out at any point if you find an error in the template, or you have questions on how to use it.

Learn to build great chatbots

Learn to build great chatbots

Read about the latest trends in the world of bots and chatbots, with special focus on chatbots for eCommerce and customer support

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