Importing participants

Participants are your workspace members who contribute to projects, are assigned to projects' tasks, provide and/or consume projects' resources. By customising ID settings of participants, you can create any desired hierarchical structure of your project team and consortium, e.g. "Organisations > Departments > Teams > Individuals". 

If you have already a list of your workspace participants, you can import it into EMDESK. 

The import function allows importing participants under specific "parent" participants, for this those "parent" participants must be already in your workspace. To build a hierarchical structure of your consortium, we recommend therefore to import participants level by level according to the hierarchical structure starting with the highest level. 

After importing, you still have the option to reorganise participants by moving them to new positions (read here how to move participants). 

Follow the instructions below on how to import participants into an EMDESK workspace.

1

To import participants, prepare your data file for importing:

• The file must be in the XLSX format, max 2MB, and have only 1 sheet (find more technical file requirements here)
• The XLSX file must contain required columns with the following headers:

Participant Name	Provide the name of a participant, e.g. Wayne Enterprises, Team A, Roland Meyer
Short	Provide the short name of the participant, e.g. WE, TeamA, Roland
Participant Type	Provide the type of the participant – enter the exact short name of the participant type as defined in your workspace* (read here what is a participant type and where to find it) * value must exist in your workspace, imported record is assigned to the first found item with this value

• The XLSX file can also contain additional information in the following optional columns:

Description	Description
Other	Other information
Budget Limit	Define budget limit for the participant in one of the following number  formats: 1000,00; 1000.00; or 1.000,00 (the budget limit is imported in that currency which is set in your general project settings)
Address 1	Address  in any format
Address 2	Additional address  in any format
Postal Code	Postal Code  in any format
PO Box	PO Box  in any format
City	City
Country	Country
Phone	Phone  in any format
Fax	Fax  in any format
Website	Website  in any format
Tags	Add tags, separating them with comma without space, e.g. tag1,tag2,tag3
Custom Identifier	If needed, you have the possibility to set a custom ID for the participant (if not set, the system will define IDs according to your workspace ID settings).
Parent Participant	Parent participant of the participant – enter the exact ID, short name, or name of the participant as defined in the "Participants" section of your workspace*, e.g. P1, BWE, or Wayne Enterprises * value must exist in your workspace, imported record is assigned to the first found item with this value

This is an example of how your data file may look like:

Note: Any  hidden rows in the excel file will be recognised for the import and if those rows are not supposed to be imported they must be taken out.

Tip: To download a sample excel file, go to the "Participants" section, click the "+ Import" button at the bottom of the section, and then click the "Sample spreadsheet" button: 

2

When the file is ready to be imported, click Participants in Home menu to open the "Participants" section.

3

Click + Import at the bottom, this will open the "Upload your file" dialogue box.

4

Click on the "Select or drop file" area to upload the file from your computer or simply drag and drop the file into this area.   

Note: The import only supports XLSX files.

5

Map column headers from your file to the participants properties in the appeared window.

• Some of the columns may be already mapped based on their names, these are marked as green:

• To map the other columns, click the dropdown menu on the right and choose the respective property:

Note: Columns that are not mapped will not be imported into the workspace.

Tip: For the required properties, you can also enter default values that will be set during import for each participant imported from the file. For that, do not map these properties with any of the columns – instead, click  Next and enter the default value next to the relevant property or choose the option from the dropdown list:

6

Click Import now at the bottom of the window.

• If import is completed without any problems, a green message will appear meaning that all records in your file were successfully recognised:
  
  

  

  The imported participants are added into the "Participants" section into the end of the list of the participants that already exist (if such exist): 
  

  

Tip: All participants from the import have a tag "import_[Date]_[Time]", e.g. "import_2022-10-20_12-10-13". To quickly find and update/delete records from the import, use the tag for filtering the data.
• If import is completed with some problems, an orange message will appear meaning that not all records in your file were recognised (values for properties were not in the correct format or were not able to be matched with existing records) and stating that an error file was downloaded:



The error file contains only those participants that were not imported and indicates with a red colour the error values. Edit the incorrect data and repeat the importing process for this new data until all records are accepted.