external linking problem

[Clive.Aspen]

Hi,

I have externally linked to a excell spreadsheet.
The fields I have linked are;
Product Reference
Short Description
Full Description
Price
Image Filename
Suppress Html
Stock in Hand
Thumbnail

These auto mapped, as I used the Actinic 'field names' on the sreadsheet.
All are linked fine, no errors displayed (the fields in actinic have changed to yellow)
The link is working fine for all the fields except 'Full Desription'
The 'Full Description' fields on the spreadsheet are not being copied to Actinic.. the actinic Full desription fileds are empty or sometimes just have '0.0' in the box.

All the other fields are linking properly... just not 'Full Description'

Any ideas anyone?

[Clive.Aspen]

weird... i just made an identical column in excell.. called it 'Full Desription' exactly the same as the other column.. and now it works.

[leehack]

Are you sure it wasn't a typo, you've typed description 3 different ways in your post, might have been something as simple as that.

[feemish]

I'm experiencing some very odd problems attempting to link Actinic v10 to an excel spreadsheet (office 2007)

I cant get the 'Full Description' field to link properly.
All the other fields are linking fine.

The link happens... ie the field on actinic turns yellow to show that it is linked, but the information from the spreadsheet is not populating the fields.. they are either blank or have the value '0.0' in them.

Another problem is that any formating of the 'full description' (bold, text colours etc) fail when 'apply' is clicked. On clicking 'apply' the last few characters of html code are deleted.

I know this sounds weird.. and its quite hard to explain, So I've made a video that shows the problems more clearly than I can explain here.

If you would... theyre only 2 mins long.. have a look and please tell me if you've seen anything like this before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3UPCSqook

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeChlgZtFYk

Excel spreadsheet, from office 2007, Actinic business plus v10, windows 7 professional, 32 bit.

Thanks.

[feemish]

the upload on the forum wont let me upload the excel files.. but I can assure you they are bog standard... very simple.

[Duncan Rounding]

Make one product manually with the product description you want including formatting (that gets truncated). Then export the catalog and take a look at the description field - compare this with the same field in your linking spreadsheet.

[feemish]

The imported fields I was originally using were exported from actinic.

I have deleted most products and simplified them further to make the error easier to see.

[feemish]

Try as I might I cant get the 'Full Desription' field to populate from the spreadsheet properly.

The values I am using were exported from Actinic (version7.0.3) as an heirarchical file. The full description field is exported the same as it is in the 'full description' box apart from line breaks are coded as '\n'. I cant see any other difference.

THe errors I am encountering are really odd.. spurious and random. I'm not a complete monkey, and I use spreadsheets and MYSQL databases on a routine basis. I have contacted support about this, because I'm unable to make progress.

If anyone is external linking to an excell spreadsheet, and linking the 'Full description' field without problem, please let me know.

[Jan]

Have you tried this :

weird... i just made an identical column in excell.. called it 'Full Desription' exactly the same as the other column.. and now it works.

[feemish]

Hi Jan,
yes, I tried that first.. no joy for me.

Did you see the video I put on youtube of the final few html characters disappearing from the 'full description' box when I click 'apply'

thats odd isnt it? how on earth can that happen?

[feemish]

I have pinpointed the issue.

If I have a 'Full Description' cell in the spreadsheet with more than 255 characters in it, Actinic v10 will hang/crash on linking.

Thats it in a nutshell.

Actinic help says that it should be able to have 20,000 characters in the 'full description' but if I put in more than 255 it crashes.

The 'disappearing' characters I mentioned in a previous post on this thread (and put a video of it happening on youtube) are disappearing for the same reason. If there are more than 255 characters in the full description within actinic, when you click 'apply' it deletes any characters over the 255 'limit'

This is only happening when linking to an external spreadsheet.

Obviously this is wrong... but seems its connected to this;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839785

I've contacted support about this.

This is the video of it happening;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3UPCSqook

[Duncan Rounding]

This is a quirk/bug of Excel and Access and I doubt there's anything that Actinic support can do. I think you will have to use Access rather than Excel.

[cren]

Hi Feemish,

Are you able to acess the actinic database directly? (using ms access for example)

If so, you could try changing the 'Format' of the 'Full Description' from '@'
to blank. This should then remove the 255 character limit.

[feemish]

This is a quirk/bug of Excel and Access and I doubt there's anything that Actinic support can do. I think you will have to use Access rather than Excel.

But this is not how its supposed to work.
According to all the actinic documents you should be able to link to this field in a spreadsheet and use up to 20,000 characters. Neither the documents or Support have not mentioned anything about this 255 character limit.. I think its a bug.

[feemish]

Hi Feemish,

Are you able to acess the actinic database directly? (using ms access for example)

If so, you could try changing the 'Format' of the 'Full Description' from '@'
to blank. This should then remove the 255 character limit.

I can access the database directly... though I am a bit nervous as I'm not used to using databases. I'll look into what you said. Thanks for the clue.