CSV from Webflow's own export not recognising its own header row upon import

Design help CMS
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There are still sooooo many things going wrong and hindering me to use a decent table-view application in combination with Webflow (to do some proper bulk-editing), that I’m getting sick of Webflow’s incapacities at this point… I’m sorry, but the world is complexer than you make it seem.

I exported Webflow’s collection to a CSV, edited and exported it with Apple Numbers, and now Webflow can’t even recognize it’s own header row anymore. Probably Apple did something “intelligently” with it, but I’m fed up trying to find out what to do about it.

I already spent too much time figuring out how to circumvent Webflow’s creation of duplicates upon importing (I know, it’s going to be tedious to relink all content with the new batch), and I’ve tried PowerImporter and AirTable, but these also giving me headaches for several reasons (“illegal quotes” and “Nills” here and there).

You’re claiming “The modern way to build for the web”, but I’m still stuck on sifting through semi-colons, curly quotes, HTML-tags, and escape-characters to get ± 44 records of 26 categories into your CMS. And I’m not going to perform 1144 copy/paste routines…

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Can you share the CSV file? Maybe Apple Numbers is the problem here, since Webflow, PowerImporter, AND Airtable couldn’t process the file.

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Hey Marc, thanks for your intended support :slight_smile:

The problems are not related.
I’ve wrestled with numerous versions and all kinds of hassle.

Testing an earlier version of my collection, AirTable plagued me with its (un)helpful intelligence to convert repeating patterns into a column with a “select” type format. Which they’re not supposed to be – it should remain “rich text”. Took me a while to figure that out… And I didn’t like AirTable’s commercial offering, so I abandoned that option.

PowerImporter is very promising, and I owe you a lot of credit for helping me out already in earlier emails. But with the current version of the CSV file, the Import reported “Illegal quotes” in the second row, and as I deleted that one, another error about something “nill” in line three kept popping up.

Because of these difficulties, and wanting to hunt any culprits in my CSV down, I thought: “Let’s see what a round-trip Webflow import yields”. And then even the header turned out incorrect…
That’s when I gave up and wrote this forum post.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/04bm70gy64d257r/Studea-Trainingen-3-edit.csv?dl=0

I’ve shared the CSV from Numbers, which is an edited version with just the header and 4 rows. Should be enough to track down what’s wrong here. Sure, Apple might have done something nasty with the encoding, or maybe I have corrupted the HTML integrity of some text entries. Perhaps it’s all sorts of trouble combined – problems just adore to show in in the company of each other.

But with three parties claiming “Modern”, “Ready to run”, and " Get started in a snap" it shouldn’t be up to me to tweak raw CSV data to behave.

And I truly hope Webflow is scratching their head severely, because offering a ‘closed’ or half-baked ‘open’ CMS in a tool like this, is just ridiculous. Either they need to improve their own take on table-view bulk-editing of collection data, or they should supply a proper and fool-proof integration with a third party.

Let’s see what comes of it.
Maybe it will cause some head-slapping or shameful blushes.

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Your file is NOT a CSV file. The fields are delimited with semicolons “;” and the quoted fields don’t properly escape the double-quotes.

Apple Numbers is trash! Do yourself a favor and install another spreadsheet application. LibreOffice is free, open-source, and runs on macOS. Then, when you save a file as CSV, you can be confident that it is in the proper format.