Mass Editing Inventory

* This is an add on module

Overview: Point of Rental has a very simple way of doing a mass export of inventory to Microsoft Excel. It is for when you have more than 20 or so items that you want to change, it could be the naming scheme, description, etc.… This prevents you from having to go into each individual item in File Maintenance and making those changes one at a time (i.e. more slowly).

1.   Through Item Availability, bring up the list of inventories you want to change. If you select a category it will bring up all items in that category. Any columns showing in item availability are options that you will be able to change once the inventory is exported. To change which columns show, right-click on the blue columns themselves and it will give you a list of all that are available. Check the ones you want and click OK. Make sure you leave the item number showing, that is how POR ties the changes you make back to the inventory.

2.   Once you have the list the way you want, right-click on any of the inventory items and click “export to spreadsheet”. If you have Microsoft Excel (or a similar program) installed on your server it will open the inventory in that program to be edited.

3.   Once the items are open in Excel you can mess with the data and change what you need. When done, save the file as a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file type. You also need to remove any excess columns in the middle that you are not going to use.  In the example below, all the prices were changed to $100 to make things easy and all unused columns were deleted (except on the ends, you cannot delete those).

4.   From Program Menu>#8 Data Management> Item Database Update. You are now ready to import the data. Double click on the 3 dots that are circled in red and locate the file you saved. The other red circle needs to be checked if you left the title information in the Excel document. If you look at the excel document in this how-to you can see that above all the item keys is the word “key” and so on. Checking the box tells POR to disregard the first line.

•NOTE – THIS MODULE YOU WILL NEED TO RENT. CALL OUR SALES FOR PRICING.

5.   Once the file is loaded you can begin assigning columns to the drop-down menus. Below is the way it should look when it’s completed (if the first row of Excel has the item information like this example, it automatically puts the words next to each drop down box to make it easier).

6.   Once you are done you can click Update Items and you are finished.