Skip to Content
This question has been flagged
importdatacsvimplementationdataerrorspreadsheet
1 Reply
561 Views
Avatar
Jason Beedle

Looking for honest answers from people doing this every day.


When a client hands over their legacy data in Excel — product SKUs, customer records, stock lists — what's your process before it touches Odoo?

Specifically interested in how you handle:

  • Product IDs converting to scientific notation (8.91E+12)
  • Dates turning into serial numbers (44796)
  • Leading zeros stripped from SKU codes
  • Trailing spaces breaking import matching

Odoo's test import catches structural errors but not content corruption from Excel. Most people I've spoken to use custom scripts or manual checking.

Curious whether there's a consistent approach across the community or whether everyone is solving this differently.

Avatar
Discard
Jason Beedle
Author

Thanks — this is exactly the pattern I keep hearing. The fragmentation is the problem. I've built something that handles all of this automatically — scientific notation, leading zeros, date coercion — in 60 seconds, with a Certificate of Integrity as the output. Happy to share if useful

Avatar
Zehntech Technologies Inc.
Best Answer

Hello, 

Yes this is a very common issue in real-world Odoo implementations, especially with legacy Excel data.

In most projects, the safest approach is to treat data preparation as a separate validation step before import. Typically this includes:

  • Converting Excel files to clean CSV format
  • Forcing text formatting for SKUs, barcodes, and IDs
  • Validating dates before import
  • Trimming leading/trailing spaces
  • Running duplicate and consistency checks
  • Performing small test imports first

You're absolutely right that Odoo’s import validation mainly checks structure, not silent Excel corruption. Because of that, many teams use a combination of preprocessing templates, validation rules, and sometimes custom scripts for large datasets.

There isn’t one universal method across the community, but the overall best practice is definitely: “clean, validate, test import, then migrate.”

Hope this works for you! If you need any help implementing this or want a more optimized approach, feel free to reach out for further discussion.

Regards,

Zehntech Technologies Inc.

santosh.sekwadia@zehntech.com

Avatar
Discard
Related Posts Replies Views Activity
How to import CSV data in OpenERP 7.0
import data csv
Avatar
Avatar
1
Mar 15
11097
IMPORT DATA in OpenERP 7
import data csv
Avatar
Avatar
Avatar
Avatar
3
Mar 15
12235
Adding constant data to a model failure Solved
module import data csv
Avatar
Avatar
2
May 23
4451
Lookup multiple values in data csv file odoo v13
data csv
Avatar
0
Sep 20
4526
Disable automatic follow when importing res.partner csv
import csv
Avatar
Avatar
Avatar
3
Jun 20
6790