I have used Kelly's method many times. I think it is faster to manipulate (or delete) 5000 items in Excel than with a checkbox to select multiple items. There are a few things that seem to cause trouble for me:
- Be aware that the item list is location dependant
- I always delete the SQUARE-generated item numbers before importing (may not be necessary)
- Any error messages give the line number that caused a problem, so it it says a line had no name, but appears to be blanks, delect the entire row in the spreadsheet and delete it. Sometime there are stray blanks or unprintable characters, especially if you export as a CSV and then use Excel. (Thanks, BTW for making the Excel export work!)
So my workflow when I have multiple updates....
1) Export as Excel - Save a copy
2) Select every row after the header and ONE item record (in Excel, click on the rown number for the first row to delete, then hold the Shift and Ctrl keys and hit the down arrow. This selects all the records. The right click on one of the row numbers and select Delete).
3) Save the file
4) Import the file using the replace option
5) Confirm that just the one item remains, then delete it
6) Starting from the copy, or just the header row, add all the items rows. making sure the data aligns with the headers (item numbers are blank)
7) Save the file, then import it using the replace option.
I only have one location, but I suspect if you have more than one you need to do this for each one.
