I'm in the process of building a catalog with about 25,000 products. Even when the data is segmented into groups of 5,000 products, my spreadsheet (libreoffice) bogs down when all data is present (particularly the html for product description pages).

To make this manageable, I want to upload/insert in stages. First I'll CREATE products by inserting bare minimum info (model, ID, Category, Prod name, qty, status, order units, etc). After that, I'll come back and UPDATE those products by inserting additional data (image, price, description, etc).

The following questions are about working with product files (eg, Full-EP2017Sep26-165412.csv).

Product page creation questions:
1. When creating NEW product pages, can I leave the following columns blank (no data)?
v_products_description_1
v_products_price
v_products_weight
v_date_avail
v_date_added

If not, I'll insert small dummy info to replace during later updates.

2. When creating NEW product pages, can I *delete* columns I don't need at the moment (meta data, specials, etc) to reduce clutter? Or does EP4 freak out if columns it expects don't exist?

Updating product page questions:
3. When updating EXISTING product pages, can I *delete* columns I don't wish to change (category, product name) to reduce clutter? Obviously I'll keep the important ones (model, ID, etc).

4. If I have to keep all columns, can I leave the ones I don't wish to change blank?