Open BMEcat in Excel
Excel can open XML — yet with a BMEcat file the result is rarely usable. Here is why, and what works instead.
Why the direct route fails
When you open an XML file, Excel offers to derive a schema. With BMEcat that leads into three dead ends. First, size: a supplier catalogue easily runs to several hundred megabytes; Excel reads the file fully into memory and stalls. Second, structure: BMEcat nests features, prices and image references several times per product. Excel's derived schema either produces one row per feature — twenty rows per product — or drops the features entirely. Third, encoding: many catalogues arrive as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252. Read blindly as UTF-8, every umlaut turns to mojibake.
What you actually need
Not the XML file in Excel, but a table derived from it. The difference is selection: a catalogue carries well over 120 distinct fields, of which about twelve are usually wanted. And it needs a decision about the repeated entries — features and image references do not fit into one row per product.
In four steps
1. Drop the catalogue onto this tool — .xml or .zip, no need to unpack the archive. 2. Tick the fields you want in the table. The usual ones are preselected: product number, description, GTIN, price, units of measure. 3. Check the values in the preview. 4. Download as .xlsx or .csv. ETIM features can go into a sheet of their own per class, since otherwise they would produce 2,000 almost empty columns.
What happens to the file
Nothing leaves your computer. The file is read in the browser; there is no server that receives it. That is not only a privacy matter: a supplier catalogue contains purchase prices, and a tool that uploads data needs a data processing agreement from your IT department.
Can you open a BMEcat file directly in Excel?
Technically yes, in practice rarely useful. Excel reads the entire file into memory and stalls at several hundred megabytes; the derived schema either turns repeated features into one row each or drops them; and catalogues in ISO-8859-1 come out garbled. It is better to derive a table containing just the fields you need.
Free, no account, no upload — the file stays on your computer.