Formating excel to csv

I am working on my product catalog, I have about 4500 products. I have an excel spreadsheet full of product descriptions. I've attached an excel file so you can see what I am working with.

When I turn this into a csv to upload to my cart I loose all of the extended description formating. How can I import this data without having in run into one long string?

I've tried replacing every "*" with "<br>" but it replaces the entire contents of the cell rather than just the "*". Any guidance would be appreciated.

How do you want the description formatted? If all the "*" are replaced by <br> you think it would work? So you are basically looking for a way to convert the list in that cell into html?

I could tell you a few ways to do it, just want to be sure of what you want the final outcome to be.

Paul

the import in my cart does not read the hard or soft line returns so I do need to turn the cells into html. I'd love to know how to do that (without doing it manually)

Well, you can try playing around with this function a bit, it should do what you are looking for.

Insert a new column into the sheet to the right of the Long Description column, let's call this new column "N" - so Long Description is "L" and the new column is "N". Enter this in cell N2:

=SUBSTITUTE(L2,"*","<br>",1)

This will replace all the leading "*" in cell L2. Just copy this formula down for all products. Then highlight the entire N column, copy it, and Past Special one column over, pasting VALUES only. The result should be a new column with all of the descriptions with a <br> instead of where the "*" was.

This should work out as a list in html.