Bring a sale in from a spreadsheet
Most houses already have the sale in a spreadsheet. Lotdesk reads it as it is, whoever made it, and shows what it made of it before anything is stored.
What it reads
- CSV, TSV or Excel (.xlsx). The old binary .xls is not read; save it as .xlsx or CSV first. It works out the encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16 or Windows-1252) and the separator by itself.
- The heading row, wherever it is. A title block above the headings is skipped, and in a workbook the sheet that looks like a catalog is chosen.
- Headings in any of the usual words: Lot no., Lot #, Item name, Est. low (£). A heading it does not know is listed, not guessed.
- The platforms' own files: Auction Flex, LiveAuctioneers, Wavebid, HiBid and Lotdesk's own, recognized by their headings.
Photographs
Put the pictures in a ZIP and name each after its lot: 27-1.jpg is lot 27's first photograph, 27A_2.jpg lot 27A's second, 027.3.png lot 27's third. The file's bytes decide what it is, so a text file named .jpg is refused. A photograph over 3 MB, or a lot's thirteenth, is refused with the reason, and pictures that match no lot are listed rather than thrown away.
How it goes
- Save the sheet as it is. There is nothing to rename first.
- Open the sale in Lotdesk and use the link on its page for bringing a file in. Choose the spreadsheet and, if you have one, the ZIP of photographs. A spreadsheet can be up to 5 MB and a ZIP up to 50 MB; a bigger set of photographs goes in over two goes.
- Read the preview. Lotdesk says whose file it thinks it is, shows every column and the field it will fill (change any, and ask again), and shows the first 10 lots exactly as they will be stored, with how many would be added, changed, left alone and skipped, and why. Nothing has been stored yet.
- Press import. The report says in plain sentences what was read, what was used, what was skipped and what became of every photograph.
- If it is not what you wanted, undo the whole import. That is possible for 30 days and takes back the lots, the photographs and the sections and consignors it made.
The rules it follows
- Doing it twice is safe. A lot is keyed by its number in the sale: the same number is updated, not added again, and a lot that already matches the file is left alone. An empty cell never blanks what the book already has.
- A row the rules refuse is skipped and named; the rest go in. A title past 200 characters, a description past 2,000, a start bid above the low estimate, a lot number no platform takes. Nothing is cut or guessed.
- A file is read, never run. A cell that begins with
=is kept as text, a formula is read as the value last saved in it, and a link to a photograph is listed but never fetched. - The free 25 count. An import counts against them: lots past the 25th are held, with the plan named as the reason, and the same file imported again once the house is on the plan brings in exactly those. A sale holds up to 3,000 lots.
- Only the owner's login brings a file in or undoes one.
A sale from another system
Files from Auction Flex, LiveAuctioneers, Wavebid and HiBid come in the same way. The formats and what each rests on are on their pages: LiveAuctioneers, Wavebid, HiBid.
The first 25 lots are free; a house on the $79 a month plan has no limit but 3,000 lots a sale.
Open a book — free for your first 25 lotsLook at the sample sale first