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A comment on Design and Implementation of CSV/Excel Upload for SaaS. Parent comment

Re:Design and Implementation of CSV/Excel Upload for SaaS by dceddia on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @04:50PM (#8962770)
One of the commenters on the article suggested sending the customer an "import template," with all of the column headers predefined. The customer simply needs to copy-paste their data into your CSV import template, and upload it.

Never tried it myself, but it sounds like a decent solution to the problem of wacky formatting.

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Re:Design and Implementation of CSV/Excel Upload for SaaS by DennisP on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @05:36PM (#8963008)
I tried it. Customers pretty frequently made their own spreadsheets that looked mostly like the template, but not quite. I was constantly fixing their uploads.

I built a system to validate their uploads and let them fix their errors on a website, and all that hassle went away.

(I still gave them the template so they'd know what it was supposed to look like, I just didn't rely on that alone.)

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