What went wrong with the file they sent you
Each of these is a real failure with a real cause, written to be useful whether or not you ever use Typesheet. The answer comes before the product on every one of them, because the file in front of you is already broken and nothing sold to you today un-breaks it.
Excel changed the dates when I opened the CSVYou opened a CSV, and dates that read one way in the file now read another way on screen. Some rows look shifted by months. Saving from Excel has now written the new reading back to disk.My SKUs turned into scientific notationA column of product codes, barcodes, or order numbers now reads 1.24E+11. Widening the column does not help, and formatting it as a number gives you a different set of digits than you started with.The leading zeros disappeared from my spreadsheetProduct codes, zip codes, or account numbers that started with one or more zeros now start with a digit. 00123 is 123, and 07030 is 7030.The supplier sent the same SKU twiceOne product code appears on more than one row of the same file, sometimes with two different prices. Nothing in the file says which of them is current.My price column will not add upA column that plainly contains prices sums to zero, or sums to less than it should. Some cells are left-aligned where others are right-aligned.Merging contact lists gives me duplicatesThree lists went in and the combined file has the same people more than once, often with slightly different spellings, capitalisation, or company names.“N/A” and dashes in a column that should be numbersA numeric column contains “N/A”, “-”, “n.a.”, or “(blank)” alongside real figures. Totals are wrong or the import refuses the whole column.My CSV columns are shifted or split in the wrong placesMost rows look right, but some have values in the wrong columns: a postcode in the country column, a phone number where the email should be. The rows that are wrong all seem to have something in common.My supplier's prices are a thousand times wrongPrices from a European supplier are out by a factor of about a thousand, or occasionally by a factor of a hundred. Nothing errored. The totals are simply wrong, and some individual rows look perfectly reasonable.The plus sign disappeared from my phone numbersInternational phone numbers have lost their leading plus. Some cells show an error instead, and some have collapsed into a single run of digits with the spaces gone.My CSV shows é where it should show éNames and addresses are full of sequences like é, ü, or ’ where accented letters, umlauts, and apostrophes should be. Sometimes there are question marks or black diamonds instead.My dates imported as five-digit numbersA column that should hold dates contains numbers around 45000 instead. They are all in a narrow range, and sorting them still puts the rows in the right order.My file has dates that do not existA date column contains days that are not on the calendar: a 31st in a thirty-day month, or a 29 February in a year that has no such day. Nothing flagged them, and they exported the same way they arrived.(1,234.56) is not being read as a negative numberAmounts wrapped in parentheses either fail to import or come through as positive numbers. A column that should net out to a small figure is roughly twice what it should be.The same email address is in my list twiceA contact list contains what is obviously the same person more than once. The addresses look identical until you notice the capitalisation, or a stray space, or that one of them is wrapped in a display name.My yes/no column has five different spellingsA column that only ever means yes or no contains several spellings of each. Filtering for “Yes” misses rows, and a count of the yeses is lower than it should be.My CSV opens with everything in one columnThe file opened, but every row sits in a single column with the separators still visible in the text. Widening the column shows the whole line, commas or semicolons and all.VLOOKUP fails on values that look identicalA lookup or a join returns nothing for rows that plainly should match. Copying both values into a cell and comparing them returns false, even though they look the same on screen.My export has subtotal rows mixed in with the dataThe file has real rows, but also rows that are section headings with one cell filled, subtotal rows with a figure and no product, and a grand total at the bottom. Loading it as-is produces totals roughly double the truth.My website column will not work as linksA column of company websites contains a mixture of forms: some with https://, some starting www, some bare domains, and a few entries that are not addresses at all. Anything that tries to use them as links works for some rows and not others.
Stop fixing the same file every month
Define the fields once, and every file after that is matched to them and checked before a row is allowed to land.