I wrote a plugin for Figma called Table Paste, which addresses a very common problem my team and I face when creating mockups and prototypes.

Stakeholders prefer and sometimes insist on realistic sample data, and for good reason: a meeting with a customer or prospect can go sideways when sample data is unrealistic or repetitive. An institutional trader will find it hard to discuss a trading interface if the market data in the prototype differs too much from live feeds they watch all day.

The design team could get realistic sample data in a spreadsheet, but there was never an easy way to get the data into a prototype. Correctly inserting data from a spreadsheet cell by cell into dozens or hundred of text boxes is crushingly tedious, but Figma’s plugin API make it possible to, among other things, automate repetitive tasks.

Table Paste is a plugin that takes tab-separated content (which you get in your clipboard when you select and copy part of a spreadsheet) and applies the cell values one by one into text boxes in Figma table row components.

The insertion order is determined by the order of the text boxes in the sidebar, but the visual arrangement could be literally anything, so while the standard use case is mockups and prototypes with styled tables, Table Paste will insert data into any repeating layout.

The plugin has been well-received and was included in the Best Figma plugins for 2020 which deserve your attention. If you have feedback, we’d love to hear from you.