View Excel Timesheets Right in Your Browser

Excel timesheets now render inline in ZEIT.IO as a clean, locale-aware HTML table across every role and share link — no downloads, no app-switching, wide tables scroll neatly, and parsing stays on our own servers for privacy.

No more downloading. No more app-switching. Your Excel timesheets now open inline in ZEIT.IO.

Until now, when a freelancer attached an Excel file to a timesheet, ZEIT.IO could only offer it as a download. To actually see the hours, you had to save the file, switch to Excel or another spreadsheet program, and flip back and forth between windows to approve or review the work. It broke your flow — and for approvers reviewing dozens of timesheets, those little interruptions add up.

Today that changes. Excel timesheets now render directly in the browser, as a clean HTML table, right next to the rest of the timesheet.

What's new

• Inline rendering. Upload an .xlsx, .xlsm, .xls, or .ods file and its first table appears immediately on the timesheet page — headers, rows, dates and numbers, all neatly formatted.
• Every role, every context. The inline view works everywhere a timesheet is shown: for organisations, approvers, freelancers, employees, and on public share links.
• Locale-aware formatting. Dates and numbers are rendered according to your language settings, so a value stays readable whether you work in German or English.
• Wide tables stay tidy. A spreadsheet with many columns won't blow up the page layout — the table sits in a horizontally scrollable panel, so you scroll the table, not the whole site.

Built with your privacy in mind

Plenty of tools solve "show a spreadsheet in a browser" by shipping your file off to a third-party viewer from a large cloud provider. For a platform that handles timesheets, contracts, and personal data — often under German and Swiss data-protection rules — that's a non-starter.

ZEIT.IO parses your Excel files on our own servers. Your data never leaves the platform to be rendered. Uploaded files are also size-limited and row-capped during parsing, so the feature stays fast and safe even on public share links.

Good to know

• The inline view shows the raw values of the first sheet — perfect for tabular timesheets. Styling, merged cells, charts, and embedded images are not reproduced.
• If a file can't be read (for example, a corrupted upload), ZEIT.IO quietly falls back to the familiar download link, so you always have a way to get to the original.
• PDFs still embed exactly as before — nothing about your current workflow changes.

Why it matters

Approving a timesheet should take seconds, not a detour through your file system. By bringing Excel content into the same page as everything else — comments, project details, invoices — ZEIT.IO keeps you in one place and keeps the review moving.

Upload an Excel timesheet and see for yourself. We think you'll never want to download one again.