Day 5 - Can TallyJ import my community list?

To properly use TallyJ, you need to load a list of the voters' names. This is done each time you set up an election.

One of the problems with older versions of TallyJ, was the difficulty in getting the names of the voters into the tool.

With Version 2, there are currently two ways to import names - from a CSV file or from TallyJ version 1.8. The import from TallyJ 1.8 will be of interest only to those who have used TallyJ in the past, and would like to load their old community and election files into the web site to test the site and compare it to what they are used to. The primary way to import names into TallyJ is from a CSV file.

Importing from a CSV file

"CSV" stands for "comma separated values" and is a very common way to copy information between computer programs. If you keep your community list in a database system, there is likely an option to "export" the names of all adults to a CSV file. Or, if you use Excel for your list, you can save a copy of that to CSV too!

The names of the columns, and how many columns you have in the file, does not matter much. Once you upload the file, TallyJ will show you those columns, and let you pick which ones it should read. At the very least, you will need columns with each person's first and last names.

The file must only contain rows with the names of adults eligible to be included in the election. Children and youth should not be loaded. However, if someone is later determined to be under age, or ineligible, you can easily mark them as such inside TallyJ.

The importing process itself is a three-step process... first you upload the file to TallyJ, then you map the columns, then import the data. Here's a sample of that screen:

Here you can see the headers found in the file, and below them, the "mapping" column chosen for each column. In the "Group" column, you can see the possible columns that TallyJ is ready to import. You can also see that I've chosen to not include the Group, Email and Phone columns.

Once the mapping is ready, click "Import Now" and the results are shown below... in this case 53 new people were added to TallyJ for this election.

If you maintain your community file in another system, that doesn't easily export to CSV, please let me know about it! If appropriate, I may be able to add the ability to import directly from it!

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