KeepnTrack Tip of the Week

For the week of 02.23.09

Updating through Imports

Overview

Many are aware of the ability to import new People into KeepnTrack but are you aware that you can use the import feature to update information on existing records?

Maintaining current information on the People (Students, Staff, Volunteers, and Vendors), in KeepnTrack can take valuable time. KeepnTrack is able to reduce the time needed to update these records by importing updated information on multiple People simultaneously. These imports can be performed once a year or more frequently to update information on existing records.

For example if you wanted to update the grade information for students you could import a student file that contained the grade field. This would eliminate the need to individually change each student’s grade.

Method

The key to accomplishing a successful import update is to include the Person Id number in the import file that corresponds with a Person Id number in KeepnTrack. This is how KeepnTrack uniquely identifies each person. Once the Person Id is part of the file to be imported then other fields can be added depending what information you wish to update. The following spreadsheet file includes a number of fields including the Person Id field.

To import a file you must first save it as a tab delimited text file. This is simple to do. In Excel, for example you can use the Save As function and in the dialog box change the Format to Text (Tab delimited). Once you have your text file you then go to the Import menu in KeepnTrack. You must make sure Duplicate Handling is set to Update. You can then indicate which file you wish to import by clicking on the Browse button.

Once you have identified the file and you click on the Next button, you are presented with a Field Mapping window. In this window there are two columns. The column on the left displays the fields that are in the file you are importing. The column on the right displays all of the potential People fields in KeepnTrack. You must use the pull down menus for each field to match them to corresponding fields in your data. If the first row of your data includes field titles you can check Ignore First Row so those titles are not imported as a record. Then you can click on the Import Data button to complete the import.