Stafftool

When you first start with a new Stafftool account, you’re faced with a somewhat daunting task — filling it up. The main obstacle is filling up the people section with all the people involved with your organization - staff members, congregation, visitors, etc. You probably already have some of these people entered into some sort of existing system, such as your own personal Mac Address Book or Outlook, or in some spreadsheet files spread across a few staff members’ computers. Your main options are to a) type everything in yourself, b) have someone else type everything in, or c) use Stafftool’s people importing tools to do it all automatically. In this post, we’ll go over option c, since that is clearly the preferable choice

There are two ways to import people into your Stafftool account - from industry standard vCard files or from CSV files. Importing from vCard files is the best way to go as they are expressly designed for storing and transfer contact information and Stafftool can import them seamlessly, even bringing in any photos that may be embedded in the vCard files. If you currently have your people in a program such as Mac OS X Address Book, getting your contacts into a vCard file is easy. I’ll go through the process of importing vCards using Address Book as an example.

vCard importing

First, you’ll want to go through your contacts and create a group for all the people you’d like to be in your Stafftool database.

Once you have all your people into a group, you can simply drag the folder out of Address Book and onto your desktop (or any other folder on your Mac) and you’ll have a .vcf vCard file.

This one file has all the contacts within that group. Once you have that ready to go, open up the people section of your Stafftool and click on the Import People button on the right side.

This will open up the importing sheet. The default tab at this time is for CSV files, so just click on the vCard Import tab and you’ll be greeted with a simple form where you can attach as many vCard .vcf files from your computer’s hard disk as you need.

From there, select your vCard files (I’ve attached my card in addition to the Church group one to demonstrate)

Then, just click the “Create Import” to initiate the import and after a few moments your new people will be in your database. That’s all there is to it!

As you can see, importing from vCard files is straightforward from Apple’s Address Book application. It’s possible to export vCard files from Microsoft Outlook, although in order to export more than one person at a time, a third party plugin will be needed, most of which can be purchased for around $20. Also, although Stafftool supports CSV importing directly, which I’ll go over next, you can also use the CSV to vCard converter if you’d prefer to have a one-step import and have a vCard copy of your contacts after you import them. Otherwise, read on.

CSV importing

If you’re like many other organizations, you’ve got a lot of peoples’ information stored in spreadsheet files that get emailed around and get out of sync. Luckily, we can get those spreadsheet files into Stafftool without too much work.

Basically, we need to get those Excel or Numbers files into the text based CSV format. I don’t have access to Excel at this time, so I’ll go through it with Numbers, although the process is pretty much the same from any spreadsheet.

The main thing to do in your spreadsheet app is make sure the structure of the table is clean and that you have a good header row that clearly labels what each column is, as this will help you with mapping your existing data to Stafftool. The other thing to be sure of is that there are no extra columns or rows in your final export, just the information that you need. Then, export to a CSV file.

Once you have your CSV file, you can go to your Stafftool account’s people section and click the Import People button and you’ll see the default CSV import form.

Browse to and select your newly created CSV file and optionally choose some groups to make the people you are importing members of. Then, click on Create Import to go to the second step of mapping your spreadsheet header columns to Stafftool’s fields.

In this example we’re mapping the fields from the spreadsheet’s header row with the corresponding fields in Stafftool’s database. Some things to take note of:

• Since the spreadsheet file had each person’s full name in one field, we choose “Name (Full)” in the drop down, and Stafftool will split the name apart and assign them to first and last names (which may not always be correct, but usually is)
• We assign the addresses to each person’s home address. Similar to the “Name (Full)” option, if addresses are stored all in one field, you can choose “Home Address (Full)” and we’ll attempt to parse it out into the individual fields. Again, it might not come through perfectly, but it should help.
• Up to 5 extra misc columns from the spreadsheet can be assigned as notes for that person

Then click on the Create Import button and the people will be imported into your database. At this time, the importing happens in real time after you click the import button, so it’s a good idea to do limited numbers of people per import. Soon, all imports will be queued so that you can do larger sets, but for now try to break them into groups of 100 or less. I’ll post an update once this limitation is removed.

Get Importing

Hopefully this helps explain how to get people into your Stafftool without having to type everything in, and that the importing features will help you get you rolling with your Stafftool account even faster. If you have any questions or comments, leave them here!