Why You Shouldn’t Use Excel to Make your Product Catalogs

Tips on how to make a product catalog in Excel

Creating an Excel product catalog should be of curiosity if your corporation:

• Is a small enterprise or start-up, with fewer assets to spend money on administration software program
• You may have a small product catalog
• You may have a compact crew
• You solely want your product catalog in a single language
• Your product catalog is just not up to date often

In the event you’re nonetheless satisfied that spreadsheets are the product catalog system for you, there are some important steps you’ll be able to take to create a easy beginning base.

1. Outline your catalog construction.
   What number of classes do you want and what number of columns are you going to work with?
2. Add photos from an exterior server.
   Including photos to a spreadsheet manually is a sluggish process, though you’ll be able to put hyperlinks into a neighborhood folder or listing. There isn’t any actual synchronization between Excel and your picture storage system, as a PIM with DAM (Digital Asset Administration) perform would supply
3. Filter by classes.
   This makes it simpler for you and the customer to find merchandise, though chances are you’ll discover looking for them by key phrases or title is ample.
4. Hyperlink to different spreadsheets.
   Every product will want its datasheet with detailed technical info. For the hyperlink to be utilized, this datasheet should have the identical title because the product.

As soon as your Excel doc is prepared, you need to use this spreadsheet to:

• Export info to different packages, equivalent to an e-commerce platform that manages your on-line retailer.
• Save info to be used in catalog design packages, equivalent to InDesign.
• Instantly obtain the spreadsheet content material as a PDF to share with distributors, retailers, or prospects (though its design gained’t be very spectacular).

Excel templates for product catalogs

Info fields in Excel product catalogs can range considerably relying on every product kind and might embrace extra or fewer variants, subcategories and subfamilies.

The difficulty with Excel product catalogs

If yours is a bigger firm with a extra bold and sophisticated catalog, there are some important points when working with Excel.

You need to manually evaluate your product info

Spreadsheets can not detect errors or omissions in your product info, nor will they determine which content material requires enchancment or enlargement, as you’ll be able to with PIM platforms.

You can’t handle a considerable amount of knowledge

The bigger the quantity of product knowledge you deal with, the extra fields, rows, columns, tabs, tables, and information you may want. And ‘extra’ means extra of every little thing: extra stress, extra file quantity, extra errors. Aside from one factor – it is no more environment friendly.

With a product catalog in Excel, it’s rather more troublesome to use updates. You’ll want to speculate rather more time coming into knowledge, making corrections, and looking for info.

The extra folks you’ve got concerned in contributing, enhancing, and updating product info (designers, product managers, salespeople, entrepreneurs), the higher the chance of making conflicting variations.

You possibly can’t join it to different software program programs

Automation can prevent valuable time and assets, however with Excel, it’s essential to frequently enter knowledge by hand. You’re unable to connect with different packages that may velocity up product modifications and updates.

When it first appeared on the scene, Excel gave the impression to be the versatile answer for 1000’s of duties and industries. Nevertheless, in an period of quickly growing applied sciences, it is rather restricted as a software to centralize product catalogs.

Tips on how to create higher product catalogs

Excel doesn’t facilitate freedom of enhancing or agility of upkeep and improve.

Quite than making a product catalog with Excel, contemplate saving effort and time with a system that:

• Automates all processes.
• Lets you schedule content material updates.
• Checks high quality and consistency.
• Synchronizes and centralizes product knowledge throughout all platforms
• Creates easy-to-locate backups and retains a historical past of modifications and variations you could recuperate.