If you’re considering a new room booking system, one of your first concerns will likely be importing data from your current scheduling software.
MIDAS allows you to import bookings and data from a range of applications, and we’re always looking to extend this support.
In our last update, v4.41, we introduced better support for importing bookings from Skedda. This included support for “multi-room” bookings, as well as additional date and time formats.
In v4.42, we’ve introduced several additional improvements to make data imports even smoother.
Automatic Field Detection and Mapping
When importing data MIDAS needs to understand how fields in your source data correspond to fields in your MIDAS system. This process is known as field mapping.
After selecting a file to import, MIDAS offers a preview of your data in a table view. At the top of each column is a drop-down selector. This is used to inform MIDAS of the type of data contained in each column.
For example, if you’re importing bookings, one column in your source data will contain the room or space name. Setting that column’s drop-down selector to “Venue” ensures the data is imported correctly.
Until now, selecting the correct value from the drop-down selector at the top of each column was a manual process. For v4.42, MIDAS will now try and automatically detect the data in each column and suggest an appropriate value for its drop-down.
Of course, you should still check the drop-down for each column before continuing, but this new ‘auto detection’ feature should make importing data into MIDAS easier.
Support for Importing Split Client Names
In many cases of data import, client names are contained within a single field of data.
For instance, if you’re importing a booking for “Joe Blogs”, it’s likely that there’ll be a single field containing the text “Joe Blogs” in your raw data.
Some booking systems however may split client names across multiple fields when exporting data. There may for example be separate fields for first (given) name and last (surname).
MIDAS typically expects a single field containing the client name, but for v4.42 we’ve added support for instances such as the one described above where names are split across fields.
This improvement makes it easier to migrate to MIDAS from booking systems such as Hallmaster.
Together, these improvements reduce manual setup and make transitioning to MIDAS faster and more efficient.