There is a flaw in the Excel ODBC driver and this is basically out of our control. The excel ODBC driver reads the first 8 rows to guess the data type of the column. The solution for this is to put ' (apostrophe or single quote) symbol before the number so that Excel doesn’t spit it out as a number (e.g. '2000) - this will be treated as text type instead of numerical data.
You can also convert your database into Tab delimited (*.txt) format. To do this, please follow the procedure below:
1. Open up an existing spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel
2. Click File menu, select "Save As" to open the Save As dialog box.
3. Select "Text (Tab delimited)" from the Save As Type pull-down menu in the Save As dialog box.
4. Click "OK" on the first dialog box warning, which advises that Text (Tab delimited) does not support multiple sheets.
5. Click "Yes" on the second dialog box warning, which advises that the Text (Tab delimited) format does not preserve formatting and features of
the spreadsheet.
6. Check that your final conversion file is legible by opening Notepad and finding the .txt extension version of your Excel file.
After converting the database to tab delimited .txt format, please check this Knowledgebase article for the steps on how to import to ShopFactory using import wizard add-on:
