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How to import an Excel board into Placker
How to import an Excel board into Placker

Add cards from a spreasheet (Excel or Google)

Gustavo Simões Braga avatar
Written by Gustavo Simões Braga
Updated over a week ago

When you click Add board on Placker overview page, you will be asked how to proceed. One of the options is to import from Excel or other Spreadsheet software.

You can also open a board, click Actions / Import at the top right corner and select this to add cards from a spreadsheet to an existing board.

Importing steps

The first step is to select which board to import the data or start a new one.

Upload a file or paste a table with the attribute headers and card data.

Match the headers of the spreadsheet with the attribute names in Placker. For example, if the card titles are referred in the spreadsheet as "Name", you need to manually tell Placker that they refer to the "Title" attribute so that they are imported correctly. Make sure to have the correct date format, so it will be added correctly to your Placker board.

Every card needs to have create date, status and list, so if these attributes are not specified in the spreadsheet, default values can be set here.

Select if cards that have matching titles should be updated instead of creating new ones.

You can check the expected rows to be created at the right side before clicking to start the import process

Once the success message is displayed, check your board to make sure that the cards have been created or updated as intended. If something went wrong, check the troubleshooting steps below.

Troubleshooting

These are some of the most common issues with the importing process:

  • No cards were imported: review the steps mentioned before were followed correctly, making sure that required fields are added (title, list, etc.)

  • Part of the cards were imported: If you have a spreadsheet with 50 rows and 25 cards only were imported, review the cells next to row 26, there are probably issues there. Avoid using line breaks in Excel cells, as this could cause the import not to work.

  • Dates not imported correctly: In the step where you check the attributes, make sure that the date fields are formatted correctly and there are no error messages, such as the one shown below:

Importing checklist items from Excel

To import card, checklists and checklist items, add an "Outline level" column with the level of that card, as in the following screenshot:

It is also possible to import checklist items into an existing card. But then you will need to "reimport" the card and checklist right before the checklist items. That is, add a row with the card and checklist in the Excel spreadsheet containing their Placker IDs, so that Placker know where to add the items. To know what is the Placker ID of a card, you can export the Placker board to Excel first (more information in this article). This is an example where checklist items are added to an existing card:

Importing predecessors

It's possible to create dependencies between cards in the importing process.

For this, it's needed to create a column with a Predecessor ID for each card and a Predecessors column with the cards that will have the finish to start link.

The image below exemplifies how this works:

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