Using Excel with importing/exporting

If you're using Excel when creating or updating products through the import system then it has a few peculiarities that you need to be aware of.

Character formatting

If you're spreadsheet contains characters like £ or é then you may find Excel replaces these with other characters.

For example, £ becomes £.

Unfortunately there's no easy solution for this. It's to do with the way that Excel 'encodes' characters as data.

Instead, we'd recommend that you use a different spreadsheet programme. Google Sheets is a free tool provided by Google to create spreadsheets.

You can download your product import sheet and click to import this into Google. You can then make your changes to the data within Google and export it as a CSV file, following the instructions below.

1. Create a new Google Sheet within your Google account

2. Select 'file' from the top menu and then 'open'

3. Select 'upload' from the next screen.

4. Next, click the button and select the file from your computer's hard drive.

5. The data will then be available for you to edit within Google Sheets.

6. Once you've made your edits select 'file' from the top menu and then 'download as' and then 'comma-separated values'.

The CSV file will then be downloaded to your computer's hard drive for you to import into your account.

Number formatting

Excel treats long numbers differently to other spreadsheet software.

Often, you might see a long number such as 947612890048338 (a GTIN for example) displays as something like 9.5E+14.

If you save your Excel file with this display unchanged then it will adjust the number without checking with you first.

To avoid this, select the cells (or columns) that contain these types of numbers and select to format the cell as a number to 0 decimal places, as shown on the screenshot below.