You may want to export products to a CSV file, make some edits or add some data, and then import the modified CSV into GroovePacker. All is going well until you find barcodes are missing digits and or looking very strange.
The most common data issues seen during product setup are dropped leading zeros and scientific notation in barcodes.
Dropped leading zeros: Barcodes appear as 1234567 instead of 0001234567
Scientific Notation: Barcodes that appear as 7.70E+11
The cause and fix for both of these issues is the same.
What is happening is that your spreadsheet editor is recognizing the UPC as a number trying to help you out by formatting it in a way that it deems more helpful. Since 0001234567 and 1234567 are equal, it discards the zeros to simplify things.
In the case of scientific notation, we must believe that some users prefer scientific notation over seeing the full number so it has been chosen as a default. Personally, I struggle to believe this, but fortunately, for our purposes, there is an easy workaround.
When opening the file on your spreadsheet app you'll need to choose the "text" data type. Below is an image that shows the process. You'll see the text data type is applied to all cells in the spreadsheet. When the file opens the UPCs and other data should be unchanged. If you add new columns that will include leading zeros or long strings of numbers be sure that they too are treated as text.
