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Page 1 of 5 Looking to set-up your first Merchant site? Or looking for an easier way to update and manage the store you have? Well, if you have Excel and do a little investing in your website, you can save yourself hours and hours of work. And that's what it's all about. Focusing your attention on this more important than updating your site. Not that it's not important to focus on updating the data to remove typos, organize more effiencently, expand and grow your business by offering more products than you can in a physical store. With Miva Merchant and Total Hosting, your store is as big as your imagination.
Welcome to Your New Friend ... Excel
I'll be honest; I have a love/hate relationship with Excel. While it does some great things and has a lot of power, Microsoft misses a few critical things for people who also work with non-Windows programs.
Miva Merchant cannot import or export directly to the .xls format that Excel uses natively. Merchant uses text files. Unfortunately, the options for exporting text files from Excel stink. You can only output as TAB-delimited or CSV (Comma Separated Values). I prefer to use the | (pipe) character. Why? Because it is not used in 99.99% of your daily data needs. So it makes a great character to use to separate values. Commas and TABs are slightly riskier since they can be used by mistake to shift a set of data. Better to "pipe-up" and use |. But Excel cannot save a custom-delimited file, unlike its big-brother, MS Access.
So what do you do? You need a way to write the output of the spreadsheet the way you want. I finally found the answer on an Excel forum. I give full credit to Earl Kiosterud and major props for his simple and elegant Text Write Program as an easy (and FREE) solution to this oversight on the part of Redmond.
I will explain more about the Text Write Program its role later. First, let's tackle creating your store data.
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