Linking to external database

[Keith]

HI,
I am thinking of using an excel sheet to link our products using the external link method. Could anyone tell me if they have done this and if its been a far better way of keeping the products updated etc.

Currently I am building them in excel, then exporting to sage and then exporting them from sage into actinic, unfortunately sometimes sage cuts the title description from a product leading to errors when importing products into actinic.

Any help or advice would be really appreciated.
Thanks
Keith

[Jan]

Hi Keith,

It is efficient in that if you change the excel sheet but you may find that it slows down the day to day speed at which Actinic runs. Also if you use excel then you cannot use the multiuser version of Actinic as excel only allows one person at a time to edit the spreadsheet.

Regards,

[Keith]

Thanks Jan,

I think I'll try this out and see how we go, we have multi user but I'll change it back to standalone.
I'm guessing I can change back once we have tried this, if we need to?

[Jan]

Hi Keith,

You can, you just have to untick the option in the dialog. If you link to an access database, it's should be quicker and can be used with a multiuser system.

Regards,

[Clueless]

Excel linking to Vn 10

Hi,

There is a problem linking excel spreadsheets in Vn 10 - if you wish to link ean for google purposes.

If you have an excel spreadsheet with ean 5032548102408
(a live example), it shows in 10.0.4 as 5032548102408.0

I have just been through this with Actinic developers. No fix available, nor likely to be forthcoming.

Further problem - if your external data is in Excel format, it is normally simple to import into Access. Beware if you have upgraded to Office 2010 - there is no .mdb save format available http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc907897

Any thoughts would be appreciated as we only have Office 2010 in house.

Thanks

Peter

[Keith]

Hi,

There is a problem linking excel spreadsheets in Vn 10 - if you wish to link ean for google purposes.

If you have an excel spreadsheet with ean 5032548102408
(a live example), it shows in 10.0.4 as 5032548102408.0

I have just been through this with Actinic developers. No fix available, nor likely to be forthcoming.

Is this the same for V11?

I'm not sure about the Microsoft problem as I am using 2007 but will be working on this in our new site using V11.

Thanks for the replies and help
Keith

[Jan]

Can you link to that field as a text field (by changing the field type in excel)? I would have thought that would stop the value being changed. I can't test it ATM because I am out of the office but wouid be interested to know.

Regards,

[feemish]

HI,
I am thinking of using an excel sheet to link our products using the external link method. Could anyone tell me if they have done this and if its been a far better way of keeping the products updated etc.
Any help or advice would be really appreciated.
Thanks
Keith

Yes I do this. My 10.0.4 store is linked to an excel database.
Took a bit of fiddling about to get it all linking correctly, but once I had sorted it out it works really well.
I make all my changes in excel.. prices, descriptions etc
Makes it very easy to make changes.. especially when theres lots of changes at once.. to prices for example..
Stock levels are linked to the database.. which is nice.
The only downer is that I cant create componant/attributes in excel.. you have to create the componants and attributes in actinic and then link to them from the spreadsheet.. apart from that its all good.