Help with importing excel spreadsheet

[Homewarestore]

hi,

After being let down by our current web designers we are now looking for other ways to build our website....it holds around 6000 products in the database and would like to know how easy it would be to actually import that into actinic.

here is a list of all the collumns in the database...

Supplier Code, Product Title, Product Desceiption, Length (mm), Width (mm), Height (mm), Depth (mm), Diameter (mm), Hole Cut (mm), Wattage Colour Of Fitting, Colour Of Light, Delivery Time, In Stock, Minimum Qty, Includes Transformer, Includes Lamp, Image, Categories, Range, Related, IP Rated, Supplier Cost Price, Our Cost Price, Our Sales Price

This is how we were told to input all our data into the excel sheet....but since the websdesigners have backed out we are left with this excel sheet we have been working on the past 2months that we arnt even sure if we can use anymore.

I think the only collumns that would need explaining are the 'related' and 'range' which contain a code that obviously is the same for each product that is part of that products range or related to it.....as we have (or originally got quoted for and got let down by) parts of our website site that offers users previews of related products and ranges of products.

The categories field contain a code that relates to where the product is found on the website ie....

-----------------
2 Home Decor and organising
2KI Kitchen
2BA Bathroom
2be Bedroom
etc...

2BA Bathroom
2BAA Bathroom Lighting
2BAB Bathroom fittings
2BAC Shaver points
-----------------

as you can imagine the site map and number of categories is very large considering we have 6000 products from all around the house/outdoor.... electrical,decorative,utensils, lighting

any help would be very apreciated.

cheers

Phil,
www.homewarestore.com

[chris ashdown]

You will find a sample excel import file in Actinic/Original/Common on you files. this will give you some assistance

I assume the numbering would be your sections and sub sections.

You could combine most of the items under the title descriptions

Looks like you have a fair amount to do

You do not mention image which is important for web selling and avoids confussion.

If you use sage then there is another way around it in that you can enter your goods in sage and then transfer them to actinic, but I have never done it that way

All the best

[NVL]

...your store could be created easily with a CSV file which using copy and paste along with the CONCATENATE command in MS Excel and a few assumptions, the basics other than a directory menu tree (which is drag and drop) with images could be done in a day.

Get your data on that Excel sheet and use a line like this;

=CONCATENATE("C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\My Pictures\Website\Actinic Images\",A1,".jpg")

What that will do is create a cell with a path to your image file and substitute the value in cell A1 as shown in bold with the value of that cell, the trick is to name all your image files the same as your product codes... so guess what data goes in column one... your product codes. As you copy and paste that line the A1 should change to B1 and so on...

If you don't have images yet skip this bit and get the office monkey to put their tea cup down and go get a camera.

Save your Excel document as a CSV and make sure you don't have any empty cells around the workspace else you'll get an error which tells you that empty bits were found, if that happens just copy + paste the data onto a new sheet and save that as a CSV... a wee bug in the software. In Actinic go to File : Import and select Flat File then next, browse to your CSV file and keep all radio buttons left unless the first line of your CSV does not have headers to decribe the columns. From there it is fairly straight forward and using the product reference as a "match up" you can update these records from that CSV as you gather more data.

I tend to set the weight at an optimal level for each product where either we don't know yet or am generally importing the framework of what has yet to come, unfortunately the next bit is the b'stard.

You'll be as quick creating the category tree in Actinic rather than in the CSV and then drag / drop your products in as required, with multiple products having very similar choices like "Philips Bulb" in 40w 60w and 100w rather than have three products your clients shall prefer to see one and select it from a radio or drop down. I'd also suggest that should a choice have different appearance like a colour for example you use Norman's image script to rotate these in a preview opposed to having a fixed image per choice.

Do the basics for now, open a bottle of booze and then get ready for the fine tuning to which I'm afraid this software isn't too friendly.

PS - You can enter your products into Sage but you'll then need to manually enter a description and click export to web, Sage import files don't have these fields even in the extended reports. However if you import the data into Sage and then Actinic your invoices match the product codes for bi-directional updates...