Importing CSV Catalog fails

[glynnis.patterson]

I have been unable to import a csv catalog and am wondering if anyone else is having luck? I believe the culprit may be a file format issue as I've even failed by performing a "saveas" on the "SampleCatalog.csv" that ships with QTO - all I did was rename it and now it fails.

Has anyone done this successfully?

[glynnis.patterson]

Through trial and error I've found that working in Notepad helps. The file format seems to be very sensitive to syntax and blank spaces so at this point I've found it easiest to create a catalog structure within QTO and the export out for use in future projects.

[jmaresco]

I've had major problems with this... The simple act of resaving an exported QTO sample catalog renders the CSV unusable by QTO. Glynnis, by opening in Notepad like you suggested, I found that Excel apparently appends a row of commas at the end of the first and third lines. Occasionally I've been able to delete those, save again, and then reopen in QTO. But that feat is not replicable and more often than not it won't open up. I've got a support request in but haven't heard back yet. This needs to be fixed.

[jmaresco]

I emailed Jason at Autodesk and he responded rather quickly with an acknowledgement of this issue, posting a video to explain a workaround.

http://vimeo.com/5714032

[glynnis.patterson]

Hi there,
For the record this Autodesk solution has been posted on the internet. It would be nice in the future to see a better import tool within QTO that manages Excel based data but for now this would be a workaround.

You may notice that after you export a catalog out of QTO as a CSV, complete some edits with Excel and the attempt to re-import the file back in to QTO that there is a problem... You end up with the error message at the left and a whole lot of frustration running through your mind (I know, I have been there)
Well, the problem is actually with Excel reformatting the information when the you save the file in a CSV format. This prevents QTO from being able to import the information correctly. Specifically it corrupts the header information. There are two ways you can "work around" the issue.
Option 1 is pretty easy and is the process that I have been using since figuring out the problem...
• Export out the same Catalog 2 times: 1 file to edit (and allow the header to get corrupted) and the other to remain intact. I usually name the second file "clean" and make sure to never actually save over that "clean" file.
• Make the needed edits to the first CSV files. Save and close when ready to import into QTO
• Open the "clean" file with a text editor (notepad works well) and copy the first 3 lines of the header. You will want to replace the corrupt lines in the other file.
• Open the edited CSV file and replace the first 4 lines of corrupted header information with the 3 lines of header information from the "clean" file.
• There should still be a space after the header and before the start of the start of the text (as in the clean file).
• Save your file as a CSV and import with QTO.
o Note: Anytime you make and edit with Excel, you will have to repeat the above the process to replace the corrupt header information.

The second solution is to download a CSV file editor to make your changes to the CSV file to prevent Excel from corrupting the header information. You can check out this short video by Autodesk's Jason Pratt for more information on the tic. http://vimeo.com/5714032 . You can also download the CSV Editor that Jason mentions in his video at this ulr: http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html