You can make After Effects videos from an Excel file, but Templater will not open the workbook itself. You export the data to a tab-delimited text file first, point Templater at that file, and from then on every row becomes one version of your video. The export is one extra step, and it is the only real difference between Excel and a live Google Sheet.
That honest answer saves a lot of confusion. People hear “Templater works with spreadsheets” and assume they can drop an .xlsx file into the panel. They cannot. Dataclay’s own FAQ puts it plainly: Templater cannot read an Excel spreadsheet directly, and you must first export the Excel data to a tab-delimited file. This guide walks through that export, pairing the file with a rigged template, previewing the result, and rendering the whole batch. It also tells you when the export step is a nuisance worth avoiding.
What Templater reads, and why Excel needs the extra step
Templater is an After Effects plugin. You prepare a composition so its layers can accept outside data, which Dataclay calls rigging, and then you pair that rigged template with a data source. Each row in the data source produces one video. A name changes, a photo changes, a price or a language changes, and the design around it stays put.
The data source can be one of three kinds. Templater includes built-in integrations for spreadsheets, specifically Google Sheets or tab-separated value files. It also reads JSON files or feeds, and it can read a plain text file holding a JSON object array exported from your own app. Dataclay’s second app, QUE, is a cloud JSON data source built to work with Templater. If you want to see the whole menu in one place, the post on five data sources you can use with Templater covers the options.
Look at that list again and notice what is missing. An .xlsx or .xls workbook is not on it. A tab-separated file is. So the path from Excel to video goes through a text file, and the text file can come from Excel, from Apple Numbers, or from Google Sheets. Dataclay’s feature list says exactly that: tab-separated-value files exported from Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Sheets.
Why does a plain text file work where a workbook does not? A tab-separated file is the simplest possible table. Every line is a row, and a tab character separates one column from the next. There are no formulas, no formatting, no hidden sheets, and nothing for the plugin to interpret except the words themselves. That simplicity is also the reason the format survives so well between programs. It is what you get when you strip a spreadsheet down to its data.
Here is the honest comparison with Google Sheets, because the trade-off is real. A Google Sheet lives in the cloud, and Templater can connect to it directly. Dataclay’s page on Templater Rig says the Google Sheets integration lets you link your After Effects project to a sheet so that Templater uses the spreadsheet data to populate the dynamic layers, and that you can preview versioning data right inside After Effects. There is no export in that workflow. You edit a cell, and the next preview reflects the edit. Several people can contribute to the same sheet, too, which matters when the data comes from a marketing person while the template belongs to a designer.
With Excel, the file on your drive is a snapshot. Change a price in the workbook and nothing happens in After Effects until you export again and Templater reads the new file. If you forget the export, you render yesterday’s data. That is the cost. It is small for a one-off batch and it adds up for a list that keeps changing.
There is a second limit worth knowing before you commit to either route. Templater can pull data from only one data source at a time, and it maps to a single worksheet. If your Excel workbook has a tab for each region, you will export the one tab you need. Dataclay’s FAQ is clear on this point for Google Sheets as well. A Google Sheet with several tabs still gives Templater only one worksheet to work from.
So when is Excel the right call? When the data already lives there and nobody wants to move it. A finance team with a monthly workbook, a sales operations person with a lead list, a producer who got a spreadsheet by email from a client. In each of those cases you are not choosing a data source so much as inheriting one, and one export is a perfectly reasonable price. When is it the wrong call? When several people edit the list all day, or when the list changes right up to the deadline. Then a live Google Sheet saves you the repeated export and the repeated mistakes that come with it. The post on automating video editing with Templater and Google Sheets shows that route end to end, and there is also a post about a required Templater update for Google Sheets users that you should read before relying on a sheet.
One more point in Excel’s favor. Because the data reaches Templater as a file you exported, you control exactly which version of the list was used. Keep that file next to the project and you can always say which rows produced which videos.
From export to a paired template
The workflow has four moves. Prepare the data, rig the template, pair the two, and preview. We will take them in that order, with an example running through all of it.
Say you run video for a chain of twelve gyms, and each location needs the same fifteen-second class promo. The master composition has a headline, a location name, a class time, a trainer photo, and a short clip of the studio. The workbook has twelve rows, one per location, and a column for each of those items. This is an illustration, not a customer story, but it has the shape of nearly every real batch we see. One design, several changing parts, a list that already exists.
Step one: export the data. In Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets, use the export or save-as option that produces tab-separated text. Dataclay has a support article called “Setting up a TSV File as a Data Source,” and that is the page to follow for the exact setup. Do two things before you export. First, decide which sheet holds the data you want, because only one can be used. Second, look at the cells that contain long text, because you are about to find out whether they survive. Templater reads your text as it appears in the spreadsheet, so commas, quotes, apostrophes, and new lines are accepted. That is good news for a headline like “Spin, Yoga & Strength: Mon/Wed” because the punctuation will arrive intact.
The same section of the feature list covers languages. You can insert characters from any language into your spreadsheet and see them appear in your text layers, and right-to-left scripts are supported. The one condition is that the fonts installed on the machine have the glyphs you need. If a column of Arabic or Japanese text shows up as empty boxes, the fault is the font and not the file. Check that before you suspect the export.
Step two: rig the template. Rigging is the design side of the job. You open your After Effects project and prepare the layers that should change, so that each can take its value from a column. Rig is the Templater edition built for this. Dataclay describes Rig as the edition that gives you the tools to prepare an After Effects project file for dynamic content, to map your data to composition layers, and to preview how those layers change as the data is processed. If you would rather not build the template yourself, Autografs are pre-built compositions that are already rigged with Templater and filled with placeholder data. You add your data and adjust the design for your audience.
Anything on a layer can be dynamic. Text, images, branding, graphic elements, colors, and embedded footage can all change from row to row. For the gym promo, the headline and location are text, the trainer is an image, the class color might shift by location, and the studio clip is footage. Footage can come from local or cloud-based sources, which means the clips do not have to sit on one drive.
Two features keep a rigged template from breaking when the data gets uneven. Layout rules adjust dynamic layers relative to their containing composition and to other layers, so a longer location name pushes things into place and you are not nudging layers by hand for each row. Time Sculpting uses time-based rules to crop, trim, shift, and stretch layers, so a studio clip that runs eight seconds and another that runs twelve both fit the same fifteen-second design. These rules matter far more for Excel-sourced lists than people expect, because lists that came from somewhere else are rarely tidy. Dataclay’s piece on layout rules explains how they behave.
Step three: pair the template with the file. In the Templater panel you choose the exported tab-separated file as the data source, and you can tell Templater where the footage lives and where the finished output should go. Templater offers project-specific presets that store the data source, the footage folder, and the output folder inside your After Effects template file. Use them. When a colleague opens the project on another machine, or when you return to it in three months, the references come along with the file. That is a small convenience that prevents a large amount of confusion.
If you have two or more template projects that need to use the same data, you can switch between them row by row from within the data source. One list could send the Monday rows to a vertical template and the Tuesday rows to a wide one. You can also set a custom output file name for each render job from the data source, so the file for the Orlando location can be named for Orlando and not for row seven.
Step four: preview before you commit. With one click, Templater previews how your data-driven compositions will look before you render or replicate. You can step through the previews of your jobs to see how Templater treats different text, footage, and colors, and resolve problematic data quickly. This is where the gym example earns its keep. Row nine has the longest location name in the list, and the preview shows whether the layout rule handled it. Row four has no trainer photo, and the preview shows you before you have rendered twelve videos with one hole in them.
Preview is available in every edition, and that detail shapes how a team can work. Dataclay’s note on Rig says it allows multiple people to preview data and test rigged template designs without buying additional Pro or Bot licenses. A designer can own the template, a producer can check the data, and only the machine that renders needs the batch edition. If you want to understand where Rig fits for your own team, the post on what Rig is good for lays it out.
For heavier quality control there is another tool. Spot checks create still images or short clips of selected frames from data-merged compositions, so you can review how the data landed across many jobs without rendering every full video. You choose the frames with named timeline markers on the composition. If you set no markers, Templater samples evenly spaced frames across the duration. The feature needs Templater 3.0 or newer and is supported in Pro and Bot. The guide on generating spot checks has the details. For a batch of twelve you may never need it. For a batch of twelve hundred, a quick spot check of every row’s middle frame is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
Batch rendering the whole list
Once the preview looks right, you have two main ways to turn the list into video files, and they are different tools for different situations. Both belong to Templater Pro and Bot. Dataclay’s FAQ is specific that the Render and Replicate buttons are available in Pro, and that none of these functions exist in Rig.
Render is the direct route. Templater works through the rows, applies each to your master composition, and renders it. You end up with finished files and the least handling.
Replicate does something different. It takes your project file, inserts the data, and saves a copy of the project for each version, kept tidy in a clean folder structure. Nothing is rendered yet. You can then work on any individual copy before rendering, or you can send the copies to the After Effects render queue or to Adobe Media Encoder. The reason to pick Replicate is control. If the client wants a hand-animated flourish on three of the twelve versions, you add it to those copies and then render. The reason to pick it for Media Encoder is output format. Media Encoder supports codecs that After Effects does not include, and Dataclay says switching from Render to Replicate is as easy as checking a box.
For the gym promo, Render is the obvious choice. Twelve rows, no hand finishing, one output format. For a batch where a motion designer wants a last pass on certain versions, Replicate earns its place. Our post on batch rendering in After Effects compares the options in more depth.
How long will the batch take? Dataclay does not give a number, because render time depends on too many things at once. Their FAQ names the factors. The average length of the videos, the output resolution, the performance of your hardware, the ratio of dynamic to static frames, how processor-intensive your effects are, and how you built the template. What they do recommend is a pre-flight. Render a single video, or a small batch, on a local machine comparable to the production one. The test video should be similar to the others in the set, so choose a typical row and not your shortest one. Then multiply the time it took by the number of videos. If you render in a queue, that is a fair estimate.
Parallel machines divide the same number. With Templater Bot running on two machines, total production time is cut in half. On three machines, it is cut to a third. The data source needs its own setup when several Bots share it, and the FAQ points to guides for that. Dataclay also says Templater breaks a massive workload into manageable batches and queues jobs one after another so it does not overload your system, which is how it handles very large lists. If your Excel file has thousands of rows, that behavior is what keeps the machine upright.
A word on Excel files and Bot, since this is where the export step bites hardest. Bot is the edition built for automation. It checks periodically for incoming data to kick off new renders, or you can push data in from the command line. A system that watches for new data is at its best when the data source updates by itself. A Google Sheet, a JSON feed, or QUE can do that. A tab-separated file you export by hand does not, because a person has to remember to produce it. Bot can use a tab-delimited file as its data source, but a person then has to produce that file, which puts someone back at the start of the loop. If your end goal is videos appearing on demand with nobody involved, plan to graduate from Excel to one of the sources that updates itself. The post on flags in data sources shows how data can tell Templater which rows to act on.
There is also Projector, the Dataclay app that renders several customized videos at once on a single machine and can distribute them afterward. It reads data from Google Sheets or QUE, so an exported Excel file is not its input. That does not mean Projector is out of reach. It means that if you want its parallel rendering and automated distribution, you will move the data into one of those sources first.
One habit saves more grief than any feature. Before you render the full list, render the first two or three rows and open the files. The preview is a good guide, and a real render is the final word. If row one is wrong, rows two through twelve will be wrong in the same way, and you would rather find that out in two minutes than two hours. The guide to speeding up After Effects exports adds ways to make each render lighter, including purging unused layers, because Templater evaluates every layer in the project.
Should you stay with Excel or move to a sheet in the cloud?
Start with Excel if your data is already in Excel. It works, it is well understood, and the export is a few seconds of work for each batch. Do not move your data to another tool just to avoid one step, particularly for a list that changes rarely or a project that runs a few times a year.
Move to Google Sheets when the extra step starts to cost you. The signs are easy to spot. You catch yourself rendering from a stale export. Two people keep their own copies of the list. The list changes the morning of the deadline. Or you want to preview live data inside After Effects while a colleague edits it. A live sheet fixes all four, and Templater connects to it directly. Move to QUE when the list outgrows a spreadsheet, or when an app, a form, or an automation tool needs to feed jobs in. Dataclay describes QUE as freeing you from the scalability limits of tabular sources, and its free trial is limited to 50 jobs by default. Our post on the hundreds of personalized videos from data compares those three paths for bigger runs.
The bottom line is simple. Excel is a fine place to keep your data and an awkward place for Templater to read it from. Export to a tab-delimited file, rig a template, preview every row, render a few before you render them all, and keep the exported file with the project. If you find yourself exporting every day, switch to a live sheet and be done with it. You can try Templater with the 30-day free trial, which Dataclay describes as fully featured, and see how the export step feels with your own list before you decide anything. For license choices, see the Templater licensing guide and the pricing information on our site.
We covered a lot above. Here are the questions people ask us most when they come to Templater with a workbook in hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Templater read an Excel file directly?
No. Templater cannot read an Excel spreadsheet directly. You first export the Excel data to a tab-delimited text file, then select that file as your data source in the Templater panel. Dataclay has a support article called “Setting up a TSV File as a Data Source” that covers the setup. The same kind of file can also come from Apple Numbers or Google Sheets, so the format is not tied to Excel at all. If you want to skip the export, Templater can connect to a Google Sheet in the cloud instead.
What file format do I export from Excel for Templater?
A tab-separated, or tab-delimited, text file. Every line is one row, and tab characters separate the columns. Templater reads your text as it appears in the spreadsheet, so commas, quotes, apostrophes, and new lines in your cells are accepted. Characters from any language work too, and right-to-left scripts are supported, as long as the fonts installed on your machine have the glyphs. Export only the sheet that holds your data, since Templater can map to a single worksheet.
Is Google Sheets better than Excel for Templater?
It is more convenient, and not more capable in what it can produce. Templater connects to a Google Sheet directly, so you skip the export, you can preview the data inside After Effects, and several people can edit the same list. With Excel you re-export whenever the data changes. If your list is stable and already lives in Excel, the export is a minor cost. If it changes often or many people touch it, a live sheet saves you from rendering stale data.
Can I use an Excel workbook with several tabs?
You can use one tab at a time. Templater can pull data from only one data source and map to a single worksheet, whether that source is a Google Sheet, a JSON file, or a tab-delimited file. If your workbook has a tab for each region or campaign, export the tab for the run you are doing. For separate runs, you export separate files and repeat the batch with each one.
Which Templater edition do I need to batch render from an exported file?
You need Pro for batch rendering or replicating, or Bot if you want the process to run without a person starting it. Rig is for setting up the project, mapping data to layers, and previewing, but its Render and Replicate buttons are disabled. The free trial includes every feature, so the buttons are all visible during the trial. After the trial, make sure the license you buy matches what you plan to do. The edition comparison chart on the Templater page spells out the differences.
How do I preview a row before I render the whole batch?
Use Templater’s preview. With one click, you see how your data-driven compositions will look before rendering or replicating, and you can step through the jobs to check how text, footage, and colors behave. Previewing is available in Rig, Pro, and Bot. For larger lists, Pro and Bot can also generate spot checks, which export stills or short clips of chosen frames from the merged compositions. Then render a few rows fully before the whole list.
How long will it take to render a batch from my spreadsheet?
It depends on video length, output resolution, your hardware, how many frames change, how heavy your effects are, and how the template is built. Dataclay recommends a pre-flight. Render one typical video on a machine like your production one, then multiply that time by the number of videos. If you run Bot on two machines, the total time is cut in half, and on three machines it is cut to a third. Pick a typical row for the test and not your shortest one.
