Catalog generator

What Catalog generator actually does

Every catalog builder that takes a spreadsheet has to answer one question first: which of your columns is the product name. Most of them answer it silently. They look for a header called name or product, and when your export says Product Name or Article or Bezeichnung they either guess something else or refuse, and either way you find out at the end. This page asks the question out loud. Once a file is read, every catalog field gets a select listing the real headers in your file, pre-set to the column its name matched and free to change, so a spreadsheet that came out of an old system is a two-click job rather than a re-export. The second thing most tools get wrong is the encoding. A CSV saved from Excel on Windows is usually not UTF-8, and a reader that decodes it as UTF-8 anyway does not fail: it substitutes a replacement character for every byte it cannot read and hands you a catalog full of black diamonds that looks like it worked. This page decodes strictly, refuses the file when the bytes do not match the encoding, says which encoding is likely, shows you what that decoder makes of the first line, and lets you accept it. Then it shows you the catalog. Not a flipbook of it and not the HTML source, the actual document, rendered in an isolated frame with remote images held back until you ask for them, so looking at your own price list does not call out to anyone.