Documentation Commerce Admin Systems Guide

Export data

Last update: November 25, 2024

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The best way to become familiar with the structure of your database is to export the data and open it in a spreadsheet. After you become familiar with the process, you can use it as an efficient way to manage large amounts of information.

Special characters—such as the equal sign, greater and less than symbols, single and double quotes, backslash, pipe, and ampersand symbols—can cause problems during data transfer. To ensure that such special characters are correctly interpreted, they can be marked as an escape sequence. For example, if the data includes a string of text such as code="str", code="str2", enclosing the text in double quotes ensures that the original double quotes are understood to be part of the data: "code="str"". When the system encounters a double set of double quotes, it understands that the outer set of double quotes is enclosing the actual data.

Data export is an asynchronous operation, which executes in the background so that you can continue working in the Admin without waiting for the operation to finish. The system displays a message when the task is complete.

Export criteria

Export filters are used to specify the data that you want to in the export file, based on attribute value. In addition, you can specify which attribute data you want to include or exclude from the export.

Data export criteria

Export filters

You can use filters to determine which SKUs are included in the export file. For example, if you enter a value in the Country of Manufacture filter, the exported CSV file includes only products manufactured in that country.

The type of filter corresponds to the data type. For date fields, you can choose the date from the Calendar . See Attribute Input Types for more information.

The format of the date is determined by the locale.

To include only records with a specific value, such as a SKU, enter the value into the Filter field. Some fields such as Price, Weight, and Set Product as New have a from/to range of values.

Exclude attributes

The checkbox in the first column is used to exclude attributes from the export file. If an attribute is excluded, the associated column in the export data is included, but empty.

Exclude	Filter	Result
	No	The exported file contains each attribute for all existing records.
	Yes	The export file contains each attribute with only the records allowed by the filter.
	No	The export file does not include the column for the excluded attribute, but does include all existing records.
	Yes	The export file does not include the column for the excluded attribute, and contains only the records allowed by the filter.

Export data

On the Admin sidebar, go to System > Data Transfer > Export.
In the Export Settings section, set Entity Type to one of the following:
- Advanced Pricing
- Products
- Customer Finances
- Customers Main File
- Customer Addresses
- Stock Sources
Accept the default Export File Format of CSV.
If you want to enclose any special characters that might be found in the data as an escape sequence, select the Fields Enclosure checkbox.
If needed, change the display of the entity attributes.

By default, the Entity Attributes section lists all the available attributes in alphabetical order. You can use the standard list controls to search for specific attributes and to sort the list. The Search and Reset Filter controls control the display of the list, but have no effect on the selection of attributes to be included in the export file.
To filter the exported data based on attribute value, do the following:
- To export only records with specific attribute values, enter the required value in the Filter column. The following example exports only a specific SKU.
- To omit an attribute from the export, select the Exclude checkbox at the beginning of the row. For example, to export only the sku and image columns, select the checkbox of every other attribute. The column appears in the export file, but without any values.
Scroll down and click Continue in the lower-right corner of the page.

Upon completion of the task, the file is processed through a message queue (make sure that your cron job is running). The exported file is saved in the var/export/ folder. For more information about the message queue, see Manage message queues in the Configuration Guide.

You can save or open the exported CSV file as a spreadsheet, then edit the data and import it back into your store.

NOTE
By default, all exported files are in the <Magento-root-directory>/var/export folder. If the Remote storage module is enabled, all exported files are in the <remote-storage-root-directory>/import_export/export folder.