Ok, till now we have really stayed on the nerdy, safe side of things by sticking to the default administration tool options, which, while they will get the job done, are pretty boring and slow. Its time to role up the sleeves and perform the first of many enhancements to osCommerce. You can look at community contributions as a way of extending or enhancing the native functionality provided by osCommerce, and it's largely due to the osCommerce community that osCommerce itself is such a success.
Having an easily extensible product is one of the great advantages of modern computing, and you are about to see why. If you have already tried to enter more than a few tens of products at a time then you will appreciate how automating that task is a real lifesaver. Specifically, Easy Populate (EP) allows you to populate and update products in many categories using data from any of the following:
Excel spreadsheet
OpenOffice spreadsheet
Filemaker database
Access database
Delimited text file...