K2 4.7 Smartform

We have a Smartform with an editable list view. Users have an Excel spreasheet with all the data elements. Instead of asking users to manually transcribing the data into the list view, is there a way to import the Excel spreadsheet directly?

I see some solutions around parsing CSV, using a Excel Service Broker community plugin and such but I am not sure if those techniques are still valid. I try to avoid CSV because a) it introduces another step to save as CSV and b) introduces issues if data contains double quotes, carriage returns and such. The service broker plugin looks interesting but I would prefer to use K2 out-of-the-box solutions as far as possible first.

Any ideas appreciated. Thanks.