🔬 Transform Excel data into AI-ready vectors with OpenAI and Supabase
⚡ 1,796 views · 🔬 Document Extraction & Analysis
Description
Description
This workflow is a practical, “dirty” solution for real-world scenarios where frontline workers keep using Excel in their daily processes.
Instead of forcing change, we take their spreadsheets as-is, clean and normalize the data, generate embeddings, and store everything in Supabase.
The benefit: frontline staff continue with their familiar tools, while data analysts gain clean, structured, and vectorized data ready for analysis or RAG-style AI applications.
How it works
- Frontline workers continue with Excel – no disruption to their daily routines.
- Upload & trigger – The workflow runs when a new Excel sheet is ready.
- Read Excel rows – Data is pulled from the specified workbook and worksheet.
- Clean & normalize – HTML is stripped, Excel dates are fixed, and text fields are standardized.
- Batch & switch – Rows are split and routed into Question/Answer processing paths.
- Generate embeddings – Cleaned Questions and Answers are converted into vectors via OpenAI.
- Merge enriched records – Original business data is combined with embeddings.
- Write into Supabase – Data lands in a structured table (
excel_records) with vector and FTS indexes.
Why it’s “dirty but useful”
- No disruption – frontline workers don’t need to change how they work.
- Analyst-ready data – Supabase holds clean, queryable data for dashboards, reporting, or AI pipelines.
- Bridge between old and new – Excel remains the input, but the backend becomes modern and scalable.
- Incremental modernization – paves the way for future workflow upgrades without blocking current work.
Outcome
Frontline workers keep their Excel-based workflows, while data can immediately be structured, searchable, and vectorized in Supabase — enabling AI-powered search, reporting, and retrieval-augmented generation.
Required setup
Supabase account
- Create a project and enable the pgvector extension.
OpenAI API Key
- Required for generating embeddings (
text-embedding-3-small).
Microsoft Excel credentials
-
Needed to connect to your workbook and worksheet.
-
Need Help
🔗 Nodes Used
HTTP Request, Postgres, Microsoft Excel 365, Supabase
📥 Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu → Import from File