Import Data with Notes?

Shawn_Ross 2016-11-19 20:57:31 UTC #1

The Import Data tool is great, and a great help. Is it possible to include 'Notes' for a service/event as part of the 'import data' formatted CSV? I can't find any documentation on this particular notes function with regards to importing

ScottLesser 2016-11-20 14:35:45 UTC #2

@Shawn_Ross unfortunately, the importer doesn't support that as of today. The Notes feature was added recently, and the importer wasn't updated during that process. We'll investigate what it would take to add that functionality though.

But, I would love to know, what types of info is your church is capturing in the notes field? What are some places you would like to be able to pull that information in (ie dashboard, charts, reports, etc)?

Thanks!

Shawn_Ross 2016-11-20 21:50:48 UTC #3

@ScottLesser thanks for the info. I figured it wouldn't pull that in since it wasn't mentioned. I'm helping us get off a paper system for metrics and generating a "50,000ft" view. We can't do so effectively with our current database, so ChurchMetrics is a great tool for us to gain important insight.

Right now we end up with various 'comments' added. Stuff like "Canceled due to Snow" (an important reflection on low #'s) or "Community & Pizza Night" (reflection on the large service #'s), along with other factors like Baptism Sunday.

I haven't thought of a way that the information could easily show detail on a report (since a report uses a fixed page layout). However, I do think that both the dashboards and charts could do this niftily by having a UI/UX element format the datapoint's X or Y axis descriptor, or even more cool, when I 'hover' on the datapoint then it has a character-limited display of the note.

The biggest challenge as I see it is doing so in an elegant way while providing some limits/structure about how much/what type of data is allowed in the notes function.

If that doesn't make sense let me know.

Tim_Lemons 2016-11-21 14:45:14 UTC #4

For us it would be the sermon series, speaker, message title and any non weather related event (since you guys have added the awesome weather widget)