Tips for a successful File Import

Using the import feature is for strong excel users as the file contents is placed directly in the backend table. The following are tips to allow for a successful import.

Avoid special characters - once your file is ready to send - do a "Control F" - find, to search for special characters that should be removed. 

Special Characters to avoid

• : colon 
• ; semicolon 
• " quotation marks 
• ' apostrophe 
• , comma 
• . period 
• ? question mark 
• / forward slash
• ` grave accent 
• ! exclamation mark 
• # number sign 
• $ dollar sign 
• % percent sign 
• & ampersand 
• * asterisk  (this cannot be searched for)
• () round brackets 
• _ underscore 
• - hyphen-minus
• + plus sign 
• = equals sign 
• {} curly brackets 
• [] square brackets 
• | vertical bar 

Remove Duplicates using the excel Remove Duplicates function

Remove any stray characters

Go to the last line of entries and scroll down and across (highlighting all and remove extra rows – in case there are random characters there that should not be), perform this on both the bottom row and last column

View in Notepad for extra spaces which may have been inserted

Verify that the headers have not been altered in any way (as final step you may want to replace the existing headers with a fresh set from the sample csv on CAS)

Note: We recommend that when you save the excel file, first same as a regular worksheet. When it is saved as a csv file, ID's with lead zeroes or many characters will change their format. If you need to go back to the file and make changes, saving it as aregular worksheet will retain the format you want imported. Once you save as a worksheet, then save an a csv file to be used for the import.