Import / upload data from Excel to report fields, organization profiles...
Hi all,
Sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere. I am new to the community but did a couple of searches.
Anyway, one thing that would really help me out is if I could import data in bulk from Excel (either a .xls or .csv, doesn't really matter) to the GLM. Two specific things I would use this for:
-Adding or updating info within organization profiles (many of them didn't put in their websites, for ex)
-Inputting data when I'm approving a bunch of grants (the grant $ amount / installments, some report fields we use for internal coding, etc.)
Basically the deal is that I just processed a bunch of grants for the first time, and having to enter the grant $ amounts and dates for every one in individual web forms was pretty tedious... Just wondering if there's a way to speed things like this up, and thought that putting all my data in an Excel file and uploading it could work wonders. (Alternatively maybe there is some way of autofilling forms that I'm not aware of - feel free to let me know. Kind of a newbie about that stuff.)
Thanks for all your work! This is a neat platform.
posted July 26, 2013 by Owen David, Community Foundation Santa Cruz County
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Personally - I don't want to import from an external spreadsheet (that would be error prone indeed) - but I WOULD appreciate being able to edit online in a spreadsheet type of view, as another user suggested in Cross populate from reports back to database. :) Thanks for keeping it on the "possibly someday" list.
posted September 13, 2013 by Mary Giraulo, United Arts of Central Florida
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Hi Chris,
Thank you so much for your reply! That makes sense. I know I'm also definitely excited about email merges, so no worries, the short-term roadmap sounds good to me. Even the couple of updates that I've seen since I've started have been very useful. Thanks for all your hard work!
Owen
posted August 29, 2013 by Owen David, Community Foundation Santa Cruz County
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Chris Dahl
commented
Hi Owen,
Welcome to the community, and thanks for taking time to post this idea. I have heard something similar regarding the ability to do bulk updates, and I can definitely understand how it would, in some cases, help from an efficiency standpoint.
That said, at this point, there are a couple reasons this is not on our near-term roadmap:
- first, we simply have a fair number of higher-priority features we need to address (Email Merge, Custom Role Names, better handling of Dates, Letters of Recommendation, improved evaluator experience, etc.).
- second, exposing batch import functionality is fairly challenging (mostly in terms of the error handling and prevention of mis-use), so if we decide to tackle this, we'll need to spend quite a bit of time on it.
- third, to date, it's received a lot less attention from our user base thus far than a number of other features.
It's definitely something we will keep in mind as we continue improving the platform. Just knowing it's something people might want can influence how we design certain aspects of the system, so that even if we can't do it immediately, we can make it easier to add later.
Hopefully you'll see value in some of the other features we're working on in the meantime. Thanks again for the post,
-chris
posted August 29, 2013 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies