Empty cells in your spreadsheet: leave blank or fill?
What an empty cell means to Content Uploader, when to leave a cell blank to remove a value, when to fill it, and why NULL, N/A and a dash are not empty cells.
- 3 min read
- Updated October 14, 2026
In a spreadsheet, an empty cell often means "nothing to say". To Content Uploader it means more: this item has no value here. That is useful when you want to remove something, and a trap when the cell is simply blank because the export had nothing to put in it.
The rule#
For every column you mapped to a field, each row's cell is the value of that field on that item.
- Filled: the field gets that value, and replaces what the site had.
- Empty: the field gets no value. For content, excerpt, categories, tags, the featured image and custom fields that removes what the item had. A Status, a Publish date or an Author has no "empty" to send: an item that exists keeps its value, and a new item gets the site's own (what each field does).
- Not mapped: the column is ignored, empty or not.
What to put in the cell#
| You want… | Do this |
|---|---|
| The site to keep what the item has now | Leave the cell with its current value, or set the field to Keep existing on updates, or do not map the column. |
| The value removed | Leave the cell empty (tags, categories, excerpt, image, custom field), or use Remove from every item to remove it everywhere. |
| A new item to have no excerpt, tags, category or image | Leave the cells empty. |
| A Status, Publish date or Author on new items | Fill it on every row, or set the field to a fixed value. An empty cell gives a draft, the moment of publishing and the publishing account (example file). |
| A blank row in the middle of the data | Nothing: blank rows are skipped. |
| A blank column at the end | Nothing: trailing empty columns are ignored. |
"Empty" means empty#
Some systems write a word where a value is missing. To Content Uploader these are values, not empty cells:
NULL,null,N/A,n/a,none,-,0and a single space are all ordinary text.NULLin a Tags column becomes a tag called NULL.N/Ain a Status column is not one of the destination choices, and the row is an error.
Replace them with truly blank cells before you upload, or filter them out in the program that makes the file.
Before you publish#
The review does not list a blank Status, Publish date or Author, because it changes nothing on an item that exists, but it shows every removal: open a few updated items and look for Empty in the This file column. If a field you did not expect to change says Empty, a cell is blank that should not be, and you can fix the file before anything is written. Anything removed by mistake can be put back by uploading the file again with the values restored (undoing an empty cell).
Required columns#
A column the site requires (the title; on Joomla also the category) cannot be empty in any row: the row is an error, is skipped, and the rest of the file goes on (required and optional columns, row errors).
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