How to import contacts and artworks with formatted text

Last edited: 23 January 2025 11:13

This guide explains how to format cells in your excel spreadsheet in order to affect the text as it appears in your database when imported. This guide is particularly useful if you wish to replace the commas (or any other characters) in your spreadsheet with line breaks to separate your contacts' addresses.

Add Bold, Italics, and line-separated formatting

In order to add formatting to certain fields within your spreadsheet, firstly, you'll need to be aware of the two different types of fields in your database. 

• Rich text database fields
  These fields require html tags to display formatting.
  Exhibitions, Provenance, Literature, and Publications fields in artwork records are rich text.
  
• Plain text database fields
  All other fields in your database are plain text, such as the Contacts Address field.
  These fields will not display text imported with html tags (see below). It is only possible to line-separate these types of fields using the plain text fields option described below.

Html tags

These simple tags tell the rich text fields in your database how to display the text. 

Bold

<b>Bold</b>

Italics

<i>Italics</i>

Line-separate/ line break

• For Rich text fields, add the <br> tag to your cell.
  This is a line break. It does not need to "wrap" around the text (like Bold and Italics do) - just place it at the end of the line you wish to split. 
• For Plain text fields, type option + return on a Macs, alt + return on Windows, to enter a line break in the cell.

Example

Formatting applied to spreadsheet:

How it will be imported into your database:

Line-separate your contact's addresses

While it's possible to follow the above Plain text method to line break text in your contacts' Address field, you're also able to add a formula to your Excel spreadsheet to do this more quickly.

This simple formula replaces any character (like commas, full stops, semi-colons etc) with a new line. Though it is most commonly used for the Address field, it can be applied to other fields in Excel too. 

Before:

After:

Steps

1. Open the Excel spreadsheet containing the contacts you wish to import into Artlogic. 

2. Rename the column with the unformatted address to something like address_unformatted (this will now serve as the placeholder column).

3. Make a new column called Address.

4. In the first row of this column add the following formula: =SUBSTITUTE(x,"y",CHAR(10)) . Where x is the first cell in the unformatted column and y is the character we want to replace, if we wanted to replace the comma (,) in cell A2 the formula would be: =SUBSTITUTE(A2,",",CHAR(10)).

5. Drag this formula cell all the way down the column as required for the new formatted addresses.

6. Optional: Set the column to wrap text in order to see the new lines in the cell.

7. Import into your Artlogic database using the regular Contacts Import Tool.

Information: Only apply the above to rows in the Excel that require the formatting, otherwise rows unintended to change will be affected by the formula too.

Related Articles

• Contacts import tool
• Artworks import tool