Importing your data is often the very first thing you do in Planning Center, and for a lot of you it's also been one of the most tedious. Before you could bring in custom data, you had to create every field option ahead of time to exactly match what was in your CSV. Even worse, if the field option didn’t exist yet we’d skip importing that value altogether.
With today’s changes, People now detects new field options in your CSV and creates the missing options automatically during import.
How it works
A new "Create new options detected from CSV fields" setting is now available on the Match Fields step of the import process. When it's on, we read the values in your CSV and add any that don't already exist as options on the field you've matched to, so there's nothing to set up in advance. It's on by default, and you can turn it off if you'd rather manage options yourself.
This works for both the following built-in and custom field types:
Built-in fields: Name prefix, Name suffix, Inactive reason, Marital status, and Membership type
Custom fields: dropdowns and checkboxes
A few fields work differently and aren't included here, like Campus, Gender, School, and background checks.
This is just the start
Field options are the first step in a larger effort to make importing less painful. If there's something about importing that still slows you down, we'd love to hear about it.
💙 The People Team,
Zane, Usborn, Shawn, Shane, Saryn, Kody, James, Gabi, Fred, Dave, and Benson