Convert Excel Data to Event Schema Markup

✓ Tested Works with CSV, Excel, Google Sheets → JSON-LD Schema

By dataclean.to team · 2026-02-13

Event planners, venue coordinators, and cultural organizations often manage event calendars in Excel — it's familiar, shareable, and handles the complex date and scheduling information that events require. But Excel's date handling introduces unique challenges when converting to schema.org Event markup. dataclean.to reads Excel event data natively, correctly interprets date and time cells that would be corrupted by CSV export, and generates validated Event JSON-LD for Google's event rich results.

The Problem

Excel's date system stores dates as serial numbers (days since January 1, 1900) and times as decimal fractions of a day. When exported to CSV, these can appear as integers like "46070" instead of "2026-03-07", or decimals like "0.791666667" instead of "7:00 PM." Even when Excel displays dates correctly, the underlying format varies by locale — "3/7/2026" in US settings becomes "7/3/2026" in European settings, creating ambiguity. Time zones are rarely stored in Excel cells. Combined date-time cells may lose their time component during export. These Excel-specific date issues compound with the general challenges of event data: inconsistent venue information, tiered pricing, and event status tracking. Event schema type specification

How to Fix It

Upload your Excel event calendar

Import your .xlsx event spreadsheet directly. dataclean.to reads Excel's native date and time cell types, avoiding the serial number and locale-dependent formatting issues that CSV export creates.

Resolve Excel date formatting issues

The platform identifies date cells and reads their actual stored values, converting them to unambiguous ISO 8601 format regardless of how they were displayed in Excel. Time components are preserved even when Excel stored them as separate cells or decimal fractions.

Clean venue and pricing data

Normalize venue information into Place and PostalAddress structures. Standardize ticket prices from Excel-formatted currency cells into decimal values with ISO 4217 currency codes. Map event status and attendance mode columns to schema.org enumeration values.

Map to Event schema properties

Map your columns to Event properties: name, startDate, endDate, location (Place with address or VirtualLocation), offers (with price and availability), description, organizer, eventAttendanceMode, eventStatus, and image.

Generate Event JSON-LD

Export validated JSON-LD for each event. Dates are in proper ISO 8601 with timezone information, locations are structured as Place objects, and pricing is in Offer objects. Test with Google's Rich Results Test before deployment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Excel-to-Event-schema harder than CSV-to-Event-schema?

Excel stores dates as serial numbers (not readable text), which can produce garbled dates when exported to CSV. Locale settings also affect date display — the same cell shows as '3/7/2026' or '7/3/2026' depending on regional settings. Direct Excel import avoids these ambiguities by reading the actual stored date values.

How should I handle events with time zones in Excel?

Excel cells don't natively store timezone information. If your events span multiple timezones, include a timezone column in your spreadsheet (e.g., 'America/New_York', 'UTC', 'EST'). dataclean.to can combine the date/time cell with the timezone column to produce complete ISO 8601 date-times with timezone offsets.

Can I convert a recurring event calendar from Excel?

For schema markup, each event occurrence needs its own specific date. If your Excel file has individual rows per occurrence with specific dates, each row becomes a separate Event schema object. If your file uses recurrence patterns (like 'Every Tuesday'), you'll need to expand those into individual dated rows first.

Example: Input → Output

name	startDate	endDate	location	price
Tech Summit 2026	2026-06-15	2026-06-17	San Francisco CA	$299
tech summit 2026	June 15 2026	Jun 17 2026	San Francisco	CA	299

Red rows show common data quality issues. dataclean.to normalizes and generates JSON-LD automatically.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Tech Summit 2026",
  "startDate": "2026-06-15",
  "endDate": "2026-06-17",
  "location": {"@type": "Place", "name": "San Francisco, CA"},
  "offers": {"@type": "Offer", "price": "299", "priceCurrency": "USD"}
}

💡 How it works: Event schema enables rich results showing dates, location, and ticket prices directly in search.

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