Easy Populate CSV: problem when open Complete File in excel

I installed Easy Populate CSV version 1.2.5.5.csv.2 on Zen Cart 1.3.8a. This is the first time I use this add-on tool.

I create and download the "Complete csv file." When I open it in excel, I don't see all the information that I am supposed to see (column headers and all the records), all I see is the description of one single item and it is broken into several rows, that's all. What am I missing?

BTW, The other csv files (Model/Price/Qty, Froogle, etc.) are OK.

henryvuong:

I installed Easy Populate CSV version 1.2.5.5.csv.2 on Zen Cart 1.3.8a. This is the first time I use this add-on tool.

I create and download the "Complete csv file." When I open it in excel, I don't see all the information that I am supposed to see (column headers and all the records), all I see is the description of one single item and it is broken into several rows, that's all. What am I missing?

BTW, The other csv files (Model/Price/Qty, Froogle, etc.) are OK.

Could you be using a mac? It can load the whole thing as a single line because of different types of line breaks on a mac.

Other than that, try opening it in a text editor and see if it's all there.

Url below may help
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Easy_Populate

I am using Windows, not Mac. I opened it with a text editor, and it looked like all the information is there.

Misty, I did check out the document before. It is actually written for the older versions.

What is the difference between this version and the older version, beside the file format? I'm thinking of trying the old version to see what happens, then I would need to remove this version from my site first?

It is actually written for the older versions
Yes,because EasyPopulate version 1.2.5.4 works.
http://modhole.com/modhole/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=viewDocument&JAS_Document_id=2&4a518f10f450e0719f940c2fab0a7c46=43df39a8dc8b460c8b11034d58f7ea8d

One thing I forgot to mention is that none of my items have model number, which I believe is the unique key to identity an item. Could that be the reason? But I downloaded other csv files and they look fine in excel format, though the model number column is blank.

none of my items have model number
Easy Populate will NOT work unless EVERY Product
has UNIQUE model number...

Yeah, I tried the old version and the same thing happened, so I guess the missing of unique model number is the reason. I'll add them now. Thanks for the info.

I'm pulling my hair here. I assigned unique product model number for each item and it's still doesn't work.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the tool and there's a difference this time, the Full file set when opened in excel does show all the information, but all in ONE single column, with all the header (v_products_model, v_products_image, v_products_name_1, etc.) in one single cell on the top.

I notice that when I open the text file with Excel, the Import Wizard does not pop up, like it should when you open a text delimited file.

And again, the four other files (PriceQty, Category, etc.) are fine, they appear in the excel format the way they should be.

If anyone wants to look at my full tab-delimited file to help me out, you can download it here:

http://shockingprice.com/external/Full-EasyPopulate.txt

Save the file in text format and open it in excel, you'll see what I said.

deleted..see post below

File is correct EXCEPT there is NO unique model number
for EACH and EVERY product...also use Open Office...
works better with EP than Excel

I figured it out, it's the HTML tags "<TABLE> <TR> <TD>" that cause Excel to format the file incorrectly. I removed them and it works fine now.

Now I have another problem: the product description is truncated when opened with Excel. The maximum number of characters in each cell is 255. Most of my product description has longer length than that. How do I lift this limit? With this limit, the whole purpose of using Easy Populate is defeated because I cannot update product information with truncated description!

(I know my file lacks the product model, but I can work on it later.)

Well after wandering online for a few hours, I figure out Excel always has this problem when importing a text field longer the 255 characters, even though each cell can contain up to 32,767 characters.

But I found a simple solution for all the problems: use MS Access to import the file, then export it back to Excel (or I can just use Access to edit the info). With Access, I don't even have to remove the HTML tags.

Thank you all for your help.

I have the same problem, What I did was save the file as a .xls for later editing and a .csv file for importing. Opening it in notepad and copy and pasting in excel works as well.