Importing Records from a Spreadsheet into an existing Form

This article describes the steps you as a Reporting Partner need to take in order to add data from a spreadsheet to an already existing ActivityInfo Database.

As a Reporting Partner, you might be required to send data periodically to a donor, a cluster, or a UN database.

Follow the steps detailed in this article to import data into an ActivityInfo Form as a Reporting Partner:

1. Check if you meet the prerequisites:

• Have an ActivityInfo account
• Have access to the ActivityInfo Form into which you need to add data (ask your Database admin for access if you’re lacking)
• Data to import (in a spreadsheet, in one of the supported formats)

2. Open ActivityInfo and log in.
3. Navigate to the Form, into which you need to import data.
4. Select the “Import” tool from the Toolbar.

5. In a separate browser window or tab, go to the spreadsheet that contains the data to be imported.
6. Ensure that the data in the spreadsheet is meeting the formatting guidelines described in Preparing the Records for import (in the spreadsheet).
7. Select the cells with data and copy (Ctrl + C) it.
   You may encounter some questions when selecting data, such as:

• Extra info: Do you have extra columns in your local spreadsheet, that are not included in the ActivityInfo Form? Select all the data, and let the Importer takes care of the rest (as it sorts out data that is not needed, and doesn’t include those).
  Contact your Database admin if you think the (missing) information should be presented in the ActivityInfo Form.
• Duplicates: When the importer feature encounters duplicate Records (as they already exist in the Database in ActivityInfo), the existing Records are updated automatically.

8. Navigate back to the ActivityInfo Form.

9. Paste (Ctrl + V) the contents of the spreadsheet that you copied in step 7.

If the data doesn’t load, go back to step 3 and manually select the data from the spreadsheet (instead of Ctrl + All and Ctrl + C). Only select the cells with data.

10. Click “Continue.”

11. Time to match columns and validate the Fields. In this example, click through each highlighted column to resolve the (most common) issues:

• Missing columns: “Text” and “Year” columns are present in the spreadsheet, but are not found in the ActivityInfo Form. This might mean that the organization requires less info than you have in your local spreadsheet. Contact your Database admin if you think the (missing) information should be presented in the ActivityInfo Form. For now, click “Ignore this column.”

If at a later point in time you need to add this information to the ActivityInfo Form, you can do a modular import as well, meaning you can add only the info you want, no need to repopulate the Database from scratch (again).

• Different column titles: Farmer owner and Owner name refer to the same information, but as it is not an exact match, the system flags the inconsistency. In this example you can select the “Owner name” Field from the list of Fields on the right side panel.
  Another example are the “Owner’s Gender” column and “Gender of owner” Field, which refer to the same data, but are titled inconsistently across platforms.

12. After resolving the inconsistencies, you can now click “Continue” in the upper right corner.

13. Review the “Import summary” overview:

• If everything is correct, proceed to the next step.
• If you need to start over, click “Cancel.”
• To go back to the matching of columns and validation of Fields part of the process, click “Back.”

14. Click “Done” in the upper right corner and wait for the updates to load.

Success, the Records are imported!