Site rebuild

[allanl]

I'm doing a site rebuild, and forgot just how difficult it is to accomplish that goal on a large build ...

I first import the section text part of the Excel sheet to setup the sections and subsections. I then link the spreadsheet fields with the site, which creates thousands of orphaned products.

I then change the Short Description field link to the section Excel field which allows dragging and dropping of all of the items to the appropirate section, and aferwards change this linked field from section to sub-section to allow easy identification and dragging into the sub folders.

All in all, a tremendous amout of manual work.

Is there any way, perhaps with an add-in to import/link an Excel database and then use the existing site to export a flat file Excel sheet? I doubt it.

The straight linkage works fine, but it doesn't import the sections, nor move the items into the section. It's a major pain in the .....!

Ideas?

[Jan]

If you are starting completely from scratch again you will have to set the section structure up manually and then drag each product into it unfortunately.

If you have an old version of the catalog you can export the catalog as a hierarchical file and then import that into this one, if you tick link 'all products to external data' on the linking dialog the products will automatically link in to the correct section.

If you don't have an old copy of the database them maybe you could for an initial import convert your spreadsheet into a flat import file, add the section details in to create the initial section/product hierarchy and then link as before.

Regards,

[allanl]

Store rebuild

Thanks for the input. I'm not absolutiely clear about what your recommend, but the manual drag and drop was confirmed, so I'll put aside a day to do that.

For step one - creating the sections and sub-section, I did find that if you rename the spread sheet columns anything that Actinic 5 expects, you only have to manually drag the section text and the sku column to the appropriate fields, WITHOUT populating the products.

This means you don't have to manually delete the products before the linkage process creates the long, long list of un-associated products.

Does version 7 do a better job of this?

[allanl]

A valuable tip

Here is a tip for the v5, and possibly the v6 and v7 population.

As explained here, I have thousands of line items that need to be dragged and dropped into the appropriate sections, and then the subsections and so on.

After creating the sections|subsections you have to manually drag and drop the individual products. You'll quickly realize that the items are sorted by SKU and not by product and that you have to ctrl+click for ever on build a draggable list to the section folders.

A better way is to sort your list in Excel by section; create a blank column and enter '1111 in the first cell, '1112 in the second and '1113 in the third. You then highlight the three cells, and double click on the dot on the lower right of the third cell. This will populate the entire column. You then create a new column and sort by the sub-section and repeat. This will give you two sorted columns, for section and sub-section.

After saving, when you use the Actinic linkage tool, you replace the product reference column with the newly created section header. You'll find that all of your items are sorted in sequence so a single drag and drop will move all of the products into each section.

It won't matter if you only have a few sections, and products. If you have 5,000 products and 3,000 sections/sub-sections it will save you countless hours of work.