How To Import Data

This video tutorial covers how to import data from files and 3rd party applications into your MIDAS booking system.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

Importing data into a MIDAS booking system.
Importing client data.
Importing booking data.

Tutorial Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MIDAS tutorials.

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can import data from other applications into MIDAS.

So I have Excel open here, and I've added three bookings on the 26th of June, and so we'll import these into MIDAS.

So we need to save this as a CSV file in Excel, and then we'll switch to MIDAS, and you'll see currently on the 26th of June there's no bookings.

So to import our data we go to MIDAS Admin Options, and we select "Manage MIDAS" from the drop-down.

And then from the "Database" tab we go across to the "Database Tools" drop down, and we select "Import Data".

MIDAS will prompt you to select the file we wish to import.

This can be a CSV file, a text file, or an iCal file.

So we'll go select file and there's my CSV file.

MIDAS will then ask me for some basic information about the data we're importing, including the field delimiter.

Now for CSV files this will normally be a comma, so we'll leave that as it is.

But the first row of our data contains field names, so we'll select that option there.

We then need to tell MIDAS what we were importing, because not only can we import booking data, you can also import clients and user data as well.

But in this example we're going to be importing booking data into the "Tutorial" database, so we click "Next Step".

MIDAS then shows a preview of the data in our CSV file, and allow us to assign each column to the relevant field in MIDAS.

So the first column of data I know is the start date and time.

Next column is the finish date and time.

Next column is the name of the client, and their organization.

This column clearly contains the venue.

This column is the booking type.

This column the number of attendees, and finally booking notes.

So the next thing we need to do is we need to give MIDAS a hint as to what format our date and times are in.

So we select an option from this drop-down at present, the dates and times are in this format here, so we'll select that option and then we click "Import Data".

MIDAS then takes a second to import the data, and it tells us three records are imported.

So if we switch back to the booking grid, Now you'll see on the 26th of June those are the three bookings that we've just imported.

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out some of our other video tutorials online.