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.

Your board stays the same until step four.

Anything applied for through Involve survives either way.

We recognise the column names used in common tracker templates, so you do not need to rename anything first. The same goes for stage words.

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 column names are normal words, not technical names, because people open this file in Excel far more often than they import it back.

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

Spreadsheets treat a cell that starts with =, +, - or @ as a formula. A formula in a downloaded file could run something on the computer that opens it. So we add an apostrophe at the start of any such cell.

That is why a note starting with a minus sign comes back with an apostrophe in front. The file is not broken.

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

We cannot identify a row that has no role, no company and no link, so we tell you about it instead of guessing. Fix those three columns in the source file and import again with Replace. What each column means is in tracker stages, end to end.