Importing product with custom attributes in bulk

[conticreative]

First of all, I am going absolutely crazy...

I have the latest VM 2 on a J2.5 site. I also have the latest CSVI.

The ultimate goal is to be able to import products in bulk into VM, but each of these products has several custom attributes such as length, height, color, ,material and such. Each of these attributes can have as little as 2 choices and as many as 50.

Here is an example (not Virtuemart) of what the product will look like: http://www.shuttercontractor.com/products/louver-shutters/vinyl-shutters/custom-made-shutters/mid-america-L1.aspx
Check the various attributes.

I have manually created test products so I think finally I have a good idea how the new attributes in VM2 work. However, when i tried exporting my samples to CSV in order to get an idea of how it all comes together as far as attributes such as Height, color and width I wasn't able to have CSVI export the attributes. Exporting product was OK, but adding my attributes I just could not make it happen.

I feel like I am missing something big but exporting is not even my ultimate goal. Importing is.

I cannot imagine that the VM folks would want us to enter 200+ attributes for each product manually. I found bulk import  for attributes, but I suppose those are attributes "kinds" not the actual values.

I hope I am making at least a bit of sense. If I am not I'll be happy to try to explain better, but I need help. Is thre a tutorial I can look at? Really, any help would be very appreciated.

Thank you.

[PolishedGeek]

There is another way to handle those attributes with an embedded form component that can pull from a database populated by CSV, but only if you don't need to track stock on any of them. For all of these custom attributes - size, color, material - does your client need to track stock?