Model Numbers Starting with Zero

[dbltoe]

Or.. try putting an apostrophe (') in front of the 0 in excel. No formatting needed.

[schoolboy]

Or.. try putting an apostrophe (') in front of the 0 in excel. No formatting needed.

Yes... good habit to get into when entering new records.

Now, to get rid of all those duplicates...

Via EP, get a full dump of the current product database. Remember, this will be a TXT file, so when you import that into a spreadsheet, it will probably retain the leading zeros.

SORT the spreadsheet by v_products_model column.

DELETE (from the sheet) all products that HAVE the leading 0.

You are now left with product records that do NOT have the leading zero.

REMOVE all columns except:

v_products_model
v_status
EOREOR

Set all values in v_status to 9

NEXT STEP IS IMPORTANT...

On your host admin C-Panel, make a copy of the images folder - call it images1 or something.

The reason for this is that v_status = 9 has a tendency to delete the product data AND its associated image. If it does delete the image, you have a quick backup... Just delete the original images folder and re-name images1 to images.

When you have a backuop images folder, run that tab-delimited file through EP. All those dupe products will go.

(I do this quite often with discontinued products from my stupplier - several hundred a week. I do a FULL BACKUP of the db first... !)

[jacdesigner]

Thank you, everyone. Really appreciate the tips.
My first suspicion was to ask the client (site owner) about formatting in Excel but when she showed me the exported file (txt tab delimited), the numbers with zeros were all in tact (not converted during export), so I assumed it was getting stripped out during upload. I will suggest the TEXT format option you described.

[jacdesigner]

Thank you but I just need to clarify.
When you say REMOVE ALL COLUMNS.....I assume that does NOT include the model number column? (Otherwise how will EZPopulate identify which item is in the row) I just need to be very specific and make sure we don't screw this up. Thanks.

Yes... good habit to get into when entering new records.

Now, to get rid of all those duplicates...

Via EP, get a full dump of the current product database. Remember, this will be a TXT file, so when you import that into a spreadsheet, it will probably retain the leading zeros.

SORT the spreadsheet by v_products_model column.

DELETE (from the sheet) all products that HAVE the leading 0.

You are now left with product records that do NOT have the leading zero.

REMOVE all columns except:

v_products_model
v_status
EOREOR

Set all values in v_status to 9

NEXT STEP IS IMPORTANT...

On your host admin C-Panel, make a copy of the images folder - call it images1 or something.

The reason for this is that v_status = 9 has a tendency to delete the product data AND its associated image. If it does delete the image, you have a quick backup... Just delete the original images folder and re-name images1 to images.

When you have a backuop images folder, run that tab-delimited file through EP. All those dupe products will go.

(I do this quite often with discontinued products from my stupplier - several hundred a week. I do a FULL BACKUP of the db first... !)

[jacdesigner]

Please disregard my last question. I now see that you DID specify to leave in the products model number.

Thank you!