import Creating Product URLs for import: A Spreadsheet Formula

I'm working through some gnarly product imports and want edto share this formula I came up with. It's nothing complicated, but it was useful to me.

This formula, where 'A2' is the cell containing a product title, strips out special characters in the title, replacing them with hyphens, and makes the whole thing lowercase. In this case, I'm replacing spaces, commas, and forward slashes. Finally, it replaces two consecutive hyphens with one, should that happen. All of the nesting makes it look like nonsense, but that's really all it's doing.

=IF(ISBLANK(A2),"",LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ","-"),",",""),"/","-"),"--","-")))

In one case where a clothing store client has the product's brand name as a tag and not in the Title, I created one of the above for the Tags field value and then concatenated it with the title URL string. That way the product page URL would contain the brand, hopefully improving SEO.

This formula will work in Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers.