How to export data from drupal to Excel? I've inherited a Drupal site. I need to extract the main page data out of the site to be able to import it into a different system, but I've never used Drupal and the site is live so I need to tread carefully in order to extract the data without affecting the site.

Currently the website has lots of content pages for manufacturers. Each manufacturer has a name, description, some images and other (mainly text) data. Say, for example, there are 2000 of these manufacturers. What I'd really like to be able to do is export an Excel file (or XML file, whatever) so each field has a different column in the spreadsheet, and each drupal page (i.e. each manufacturer) is a different row in the export spreadsheet. Ideally the images will be exported as full URLs in a column in the spreadsheet.

When I log into Drupal and click the 'content' button at the top, it gives me a list of every page on the site. I can filter this to only show 'Manufacturer' pages. When I edit a specific manufacturer page it gives me a form containing all of the editable fields for that manufacturer, prepopulated with the data to edit. I just need this information for each manufacturer dumped out into a spreadsheet.

So as a complete Drupal noob, where would I start in doing this? Would I just go straight to the database and try to piece it together (if so, is the data stored in a single table, or will there be some major queries involved in doing this - any pointers about which tables to look at would be greatly received) or is there a tool for getting a bulk export of this kind of thing? I guess I could even create a web page which displayed this information in an HTML table and just scrape it from there, but ideally an export would be nice.
You are in luck! There is a module for that. (I love saying that!)


Views Excel Export
Views


This is an extension for Views module, which pretty much can list any data from Drupal's DB; users, content, comments and any other entities. You will have to install the Views module and then install the Views Excel Export module which will export the list generated by Views to an Excel file. Without any code! Brilliant isn't it?

If you need instructions on how to install a module in Drupal, you can follow Installing modules (Drupal 7) on Drupal documentation.