Import a spreadsheet of gifts
What Relae reads out of a workbook, what it asks you about, and what it refuses to guess.
Most giving history starts life in a spreadsheet, and real spreadsheets are messy: several tabs, a title row above the headings, subtotals in the middle, a column of notes somebody added in 2019. Relae reads the file as it actually is rather than demanding you tidy it first.
What it works out on its own
- Where the real table starts, so a title row or a blank line above the headings does not become your column names.
- What each column holds, from the heading and from the values under it. A column called Amount with dates in it is dates.
- Dates the way your spreadsheet meant them, including the difference between 03/04 as March 4th and as April 3rd, decided per column rather than per file.
- Money, including negatives written as (250.00), and long reference numbers that a spreadsheet would otherwise mangle into scientific notation.
- Subtotal and grand-total rows, which are set aside rather than imported as a very generous donor called Total.
More than one tab
If your workbook keeps donors on one tab and gifts on another, Relae looks for the column that joins them, even when the two tabs call it different things. When it finds one it reads the workbook the way you do: as a set of related tables, not as separate files that happen to be in the same document.
What it will not guess
Relae would rather ask than be confidently wrong. If two columns are equally good candidates for the donor name, or a column it needs is missing, it stops and asks you one question with your own data shown next to each option. If it cannot tell which column holds the name, it shows you every column and lets you pick.