‘There is no such thing as criticism just feedback’
Ps. I am not a developer just a brave user who is generally good at following instructions.
At the risk of jumping on the ‘I don’t like OpenOffice bandwagon…..’
Having invested a colossal amount of time (months) and effort producing a CSV file with 75,000 records I experienced a variety of problems:
1) I understand the reason why it doesn’t make sense to build massive data management functionality into GD
2) I am an experienced Excel user – along with a few others – having to learn OpenOffice as well is simply annoying
2) It appears you not only need OpenOffice but the GD documentation also describes functions from Libreoffice – this is not made clear
3) OpenOffice is nowhere near as good as Excel for handling large file sizes. 75,000 rows caused problems in OpenOffice. For example I sorted data by a column and noticed later that my data columns no longer had the original integrity – names and addresses no longer aligned – caused me weeks of work. Also cutting and pasting columns of data from Excel to OpenOffice doesn’t work – I started with 75,000 rows in Excel and ended up with 65,000 in OpenOffice. My confidence in OpenOffice is non-existent. Excel is simply a better spreadsheet. Fact. The fact that Excel doesn’t work with GD is a limitation.
4) In the end I prepared all of my data in Excel, saved it as a CSV and then opened it in Libreoffice and followed the ‘save a copy’ routine described in ‘tips and tricks’ and the file Import has worked.
5) I limited my Import to a 2Mb file size – I didn’t trust what would happen if I tried to Import a 40mb file – thus allowing me to Import c. 4,000 records at a time. I have a 58 Mb/s upload speed and a JaguarPC VPS server with 2 CPU’s and 2Mb memory. The Import has taken 4 hours – very time consuming. During this time I had to leave my PC running and couldn’t do any work on the website.
7) If a 40Mb Import were supported by GD and my server it would have taken 80 hours before I found out there was a problem.
6) During the Import I have not been able to do any other work in the backend otherwise the Import stops. It would be far better if the Import could run in the background.
7) I have realised during the Import that I need to change one field. I am expecting to have to export all of the data again – this is very quick 🙂 Make the change – also very quick 🙂 – and then reimport the data again – horribly slow 🙁 plus the uncertainty of success…..Not being able to make simple adjustments is a major problem. I have tried WP Search and Replace and crashed everything; I have to say that I am not keen to learn yet another tool outside GD.
8) Early experiments with importing my data caused duplication problems – I misinterpreted ‘if pos ID exists…..’ and I had to delete records en masse from GD – this took hours. This is also very challenging and time consuming because the facility to select a group of records is extremely limited. For example you can only sort records by title or date published or select by name. Furthermore GD export only allows selection by published dates. This puts a major emphasis on getting the Import right in the first place. Any improvement in the selection at GD export would help hugely .e.g. Selection by ‘post ID’ from xxxx to xxxx.
Just feedback.
Bests
Al
