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Thread: Use WSI or Excel import for this situation?

  1. 01-09-2010, 09:42 PM #1
    supergriff is offline Senior Member
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Posts
    102

    Default Use WSI or Excel import for this situation?

    We are in process of restructuring our site (7.0.2.5), completely revamping category, department & product types..

    We will be adding a lot of new products but also have 1500 products in the system that need manually re-mapping to type, category, department...

    The staff who will be doing the updates are familiar with the excel import as they have created import spreadsheets several times from raw supplier data..

    They would likely be resistant to trying to get their heads around an XML document (which is harder to read / edit quickly by hand compared to spreadsheet)..

    I have not experimented with WSI yet - but from what I can tell (please correct me if wrong), updating / importing products would involve bulk editing of XML documents..

    So - in this situation - why would WSI be a better solution?

    NOTE: admittedly the excel option for product updates would be pretty complicated as i'd have to take their spreadsheets and write a macro to convert into SQL statements that I'd run directly against DB to update the necessary data - however for the people going throu -gh manually updating each product that would be irrelevant...

    UPDATE TO THIS QUESTION:
    In fact... do you think it would be easier all round to just make bulk updates like this (which require going through each product individually) via the admin system???
    Last edited by supergriff; 01-09-2010 at 09:46 PM.
  2. 02-12-2010, 02:45 AM #2
    Upscale_Automotive is offline Senior Member
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
    Posts
    201

    Default

    Free bump, I would like to see the answer to these questions myself! It is always said that the WSI is the way to go, but I am in the same boat as you... having to manually edit XML files. I assume that the WSI proponents make it seem so easy because they create programs to handle all of the XML editing for them, but I am not capable of that. If it comes down to manually editing an XML file, the admin site products, or an Excel file, I would always choose the Excel file. The problem is that there is no straightforward way to export to an Excel file, edit, and import the updated file back again. Anyway, I am preaching to the choir. Looking forward to more insight from other members!