12 tips for cleaning up a wine inventory spreadsheet before you import it

A wine inventory spreadsheet is a record of everything you've bought, stored and meant to open. Before you move it into a cellar app, give it a tidy. It doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be consistent.

This is the quick-reference companion to our full guide, how to move your wine cellar spreadsheet into an app without losing data. Work through the list, tick off what applies, and you'll be ready to import in an afternoon.

Before you touch anything

1. Work on a copy

Duplicate the file and clean the copy. Keep the original as your safety net. If a value looks strange after import, you can check what it said before you edited it.

2. Write down your totals

Note how many rows you have and the total bottle count. After the import, these two numbers tell you at a glance whether everything came across.

Tidy the columns in your wine inventory spreadsheet

3. One fact per column

Split anything that combines two facts. "Producer + wine + vintage" in one cell should become three columns. "Cellar / Rack 4" should become a location column and a bin column. This one change solves most import problems.

4. Use clear, ordinary headers

Plain headers such as Producer, Wine, Vintage, Appellation, Region, Country, Color, Bottle Size, Quantity, Location, Bin, Price and Notes are easy for any importer to recognize. Selara Sommelier matches your columns to its fields and flags anything it wants you to confirm, but clear names make that step quicker.

5. Keep vintages as years

Use a four-digit year in the vintage column. For non-vintage Champagne and other blends across years, write "NV" rather than leaving the cell blank, so a missing vintage and a non-vintage wine don't look the same.

6. Make quantity a plain number

"6", not "6 btls" or "half a case". If you need to explain something, like "2 promised to my brother", put it in Notes.

7. Standardize prices

Pick price per bottle or price per case and stick with it. Selara Sommelier tracks both price paid per bottle and total purchase price, in multiple currencies, so keep the currency clear if you buy abroad. A currency column or a consistent symbol helps.

Bottle sizes and storage

8. Write bottle sizes as volumes

Use 375 ml, 750 ml, 1.5 L, 3 L and so on. Names like "magnum" are fine and widely understood, but some large-format names change meaning by region. A Jeroboam is 3 liters in Champagne and 4.5 liters in Bordeaux, so the volume is the safer choice. If a row has no size, decide whether it really is a standard 750 ml bottle and fill it in.

9. Give every location one name

"Basement", "Bsmt" and "downstairs cellar" should become a single name. Do the same for off-site storage and fridges. When you import into Selara Sommelier, you can match each location name in your file to an existing location, create a new one, or set a default location for the whole import. Consistent names make that a one-click step.

10. Decide how deep your bins go

If you track storage precisely, say Room, then Rack, then Slot, keep each level in a consistent format, like "Room A / Rack 3 / Slot 12". Selara Sommelier supports nested bins on Grand Cru, with deeper nesting on Grand Cru Exceptionnel. Premier Cru keeps storage flat, so a simple location column is all you need there.

Duplicates and history

11. Hunt down duplicates

Sort by producer, then wine, then vintage, and scan for repeated rows. Aim for one row per wine, vintage, bottle size and location, with quantity doing the counting. Keep separate rows only when something really differs, such as two purchases at different prices that you want to remember.

12. Move drunk bottles to their own tab

Rows with a quantity of zero belong in your drinking history, not your active cellar. Put them on a separate tab. In Selara Sommelier, those go into History through the Import history option, while the active tab goes through the regular cellar import.

Things you can leave alone

You don't have to fix everything. Some common spreadsheet habits are handled for you.

If you wrote "France" once and left the rows beneath it blank, Selara Sommelier's importer recognizes that carry-forward pattern. If your workbook has a tab per location or per region, you can choose which tabs to import.

Your file format probably doesn't need converting either. Selara Sommelier accepts .csv, .tsv, .tab, .txt, .xlsx, .xls, .json, .numbers, or .xml, and each file can hold up to 10,000 rows and 25 MB.

Bottles that aren't in the sheet yet

Every collector has a few bottles that never made it into the spreadsheet. Don't add them by hand. After your import, photograph the labels with your phone and Selara Sommelier fills in the details for you to approve. For a recent delivery, upload the merchant's PDF invoice, or take a photo of the paper invoice or the order on screen, and pick the line items you want to add.

Quick checklist

• Working on a copy, with row and bottle totals noted
• One fact per column, with plain headers
• Vintages are years or "NV"
• Quantities are numbers
• Prices and currencies are consistent
• Bottle sizes written as volumes
• One name per location, with bins in a consistent format
• Duplicates merged
• Drunk bottles moved to a separate tab

When the list is done

The import itself takes minutes. You'll preview everything before it lands, and you can remove an import if you uploaded the wrong file. For the full walk-through, read the complete spreadsheet migration guide. If you're coming from another cellar app, see how to switch to Selara Sommelier.

Selara Sommelier works on iPhone and the web, and Premier Cru is free for up to 100 bottles in one location. See how importing works when you're ready.