Welcome to the non M$ world ;-) The is a substantial upside to not rotating around the GUI.

Anyway with empty fields yes it *should* still work. Excel dumps empty fields as 

field1\t\tfield3\tfield4

[download]

So when mysql splits on \t you get an undef (NULL) value. In that case add "default 'blah'" to the create ie: 

timestamp date default '1970-01-01',
joker char(32) default 'anon',

[download]

and mysql will fill in the blanks.

If your data is really dirty you may wish to parse the tab sep file with perl, check for whatever then write out all the clean data to a fresh tab sep file before you import. You could flag the errors, write them to a tab sep file and then open and fix it in Excel or just automate it.

One thing to be aware of is that you probably will want a primary key on id (so id must be not null and must also be unique). The other key/index options you will probably want is an INDEX on some/all of the other fields depending on how you plan to search it.

cheers

tachyon

In reply to Re: Re: Re: From excel to mysql... by tachyon
in thread From excel to mysql... by kiat

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.