Creating CSV files for children and staff

[Lauren]

You can upload child and staff details onto Tapestry via CSV file, which is a type of excel sheet. This is a quick guide to show you what the excel documents for children and staff imports will look like and how to create a CSV file from a standard excel file.

Below are examples of the excel sheets with all the titles of the fields Tapestry will ask for for each of the child and staff imports. It is really important that you add the field headings into the CSV file - otherwise you will lose the first child/staff member when importing the document.

Please note that it's easier to have two data sheets - one for children and one for staff. You can put them both on the same sheet if you like, but you will still need to upload it twice (once in the staff section and once in the child section) and when you do, you will need to tell Tapestry to not import the irrelevant headings.

Child: (Just in case you can't read those, they are: First Name, Last Name, Gender, DoB, UPN, EAL, Free School Meals, SEN, Post Code and Pupil Premium)

 

 

Staff: (First Name, Surname, Email and Staff Type). Please note that when you have imported this, you will be presented with 4 different options for account activation and password creation. This information can be downloaded with their email counterpart as a separate CSV file.

 

 

In order to change this from the standard file type in excel to CSV format you should go to "File" > "Save As" > "Save as type:" " CSV (Comma Delimited)".

 

 

You should then be able to upload it to Tapestry. For guidance on how to do that, please check out this tutorial.

There are a few things that you should note:

• Tapestry expects the file to contain a row of headings followed by the rows of data with no gaps. If there are any blank rows, delete these and shift the remaining data up.
• You can have extra columns of information but if Tapestry doesn't collect that data, you won't be able to add it into Tapestry.
• The only fields that absolutely have to be filled in with the child's data are "First Name", "Last Name", and "DoB", and with staff data 'First Name', 'Last Name', 'Email' and 'Staff Type'.
• You can upload as many or as few people as you want this way - the only limitation for children will be that you're uploading equal to, or fewer, children than you have space for on your account.
• For the date format you should always use 4 digits for the year, for example 2017 rather than 17. You can use either a / or - to separate the year, month and date and you must put the month in the middle between the year and day e.g. DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD.
• If working on MS for Macbook, the DOB format of DD/MM/YY is not accepted. The format would have to be DD/MM/YYYY and saved as Windows Comma Separated (.csv).

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