Help / The tracker

Import and export the tracker

Bring in the spreadsheet you already keep, choose add or replace, and take the whole board out again as Excel or CSV with the same columns.

Importing what you already keep

1. Open the tracker and choose import.
2. Pick an .xlsx or .csv file.
3. Read the summary. It tells you how many roles the board can read, how many rows it cannot and why, and how many rows you have now.
4. Choose Add or Replace.

Nothing changes until step four.

Anything applied for through Involve survives either way.

Column headers are matched through an alias table, so the spellings from common tracker templates are understood without renaming anything first. Stage words are matched the same way.

Exporting

Two buttons, one table. The Excel file and the CSV carry the same twenty-seven columns in the same order:

Company, Role, Stage, Applied On, Deadline, Job Type, Salary, Salary Amount, Salary Currency, Location, URL, Source, Updated, Next Action, Next Action Date, Contact Name, Contact Email, Contact Link, Contact Role, Resume, Cover Letter, Portfolio, Notes Link, Match Score, Tags, Notes, ID.

The headers are the words a person would put at the top of a spreadsheet rather than internal field names, because this file gets opened in Excel far more often than it gets read back by us.

Two columns are written as real numbers rather than text, so a spreadsheet can sort and total them: the salary amount and the match score.

One safety detail

Spreadsheet applications treat a cell beginning with an equals sign, a plus, a minus or an at sign as a formula, and a formula in an exported file is a way to run something on the machine that opens it. Every such cell is prefixed with an apostrophe on the way out.

That is why a note you wrote starting with a minus sign comes back with a leading apostrophe. It is not a corrupted export.

What to do with the file

• Sort by country or by month and see where your effort actually went. The answer is usually not the one you would give from memory.
• Filter to the live rows before a week of chasing.
• Keep it as a backup. Deleting your data on the account screen is immediate and cannot be undone, so export first if you want a copy.

When the import reads fewer rows than the file has

Rows without any of a role, a company or a link cannot be identified, so they are reported rather than guessed at. Fix those three columns in the source file and import again with Replace. What each column means is in tracker stages, end to end.