Convert BMEcat to CSV
CSV is the format hardest to argue with — and precisely for that reason the one where the most small things go wrong.
Three small things that usually go wrong
The separator. German Excel expects a semicolon, not a comma. A comma-separated file lands entirely in column A. The encoding. Without a byte order mark at the start of the file, Excel guesses — and with accented characters it likes to guess wrong. A CSV with a BOM opens correctly on double-click; without one you have to go through the import wizard. The decimal separator. BMEcat writes prices with a dot, as the schema requires. To turn those into numbers in your spreadsheet you must pick the right locale on import — otherwise the values stay text and do not compute.
Which fields belong in the CSV
A CSV has one row per product. That admits only fields occurring at most once per product — product number, description, GTIN, price, units. ETIM features and image references occur repeatedly; they need an export of their own. This tool shows for every field whether it is unique, how often it occurs and with what sample value — anything that cannot become a column is greyed out.
And the size?
The export runs as a stream, not in memory: the file is traversed a second time and the CSV written piece by piece. The row count is therefore not limited — unlike Excel, which ends at 1,048,576 rows. For a very large catalogue CSV is often the better choice.
How do I convert a BMEcat file to CSV?
Open the catalogue file, tick the fields you want and download as CSV. Three settings matter, and this tool applies them fixed: semicolon as separator, a byte order mark for accented characters, and the dot as decimal separator, as BMEcat prescribes. Only fields occurring at most once per product can go into a CSV.
Free, no account, no upload — the file stays on your computer.