common CSV file errors

common CSV file errors

How can you avoid the most common CSV file errors?

CSV files save you valuable time in Evalandgo. They come into play at three moments: importing your contacts, pre-filling a text question from a lookup table, and recording several respondents' answers in bulk. Here are the most common blockers and, above all, how to avoid them on the first try.

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Good to know Open your CSV files with Notepad rather than Excel. Excel tends to reinterpret files and may add quotation marks to your labels for no reason, which causes import errors.

Getting your contact list import right

When you import a contact list, four points come up again and again:

  1. Remove duplicates before uploading. If the same email appears twice in your file, the import is rejected.
  2. Stay within the 500 KB size limit. Beyond that, split your file into several imports.
  3. Check the format of your addresses. A misspelled address, or one containing a space, will not be used for sending.
  4. Choose the right separator and encoding. The ; and , separators are accepted. Favour UTF-8 encoding to preserve accented characters (ISO-8859-1 and MacOS encodings are also supported).

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Good to know An email listed twice in the same file blocks the import. However, if a contact already exists in your address book, it is simply updated: no duplicate is created.

Pre-filling a text question from a CSV file

Alert
Feature available only to customers with a PRO+ subscription.

This feature automatically fills a text question based on the answer given to an earlier question, using a lookup table. To make it work smoothly:

  1. Prepare a file with exactly 2 columns. The first column holds the expected value, the second the value to display. Any other structure is rejected.
  2. Stay under the 2 MB size limit.
  3. Specify whether your file has a header row. Otherwise, the first line will be treated as data.
  4. Select the correct separator in the options. A wrong separator prevents any match from being found.

InfoGood to know If the value entered by the respondent is not in your file, the target question simply stays empty. Keep in mind, too, that the question to pre-fill must be a Free text type, and that only one CSV file can be linked to each question.

Recording several respondents' answers at once

Bulk answer pre-filling lets you import many respondents' answers in one go (handy for entering paper questionnaires, for example). Two things to watch.

The expected format is one row per respondent and one column per question:

  • Single choice: the exact answer label.
  • Multiple choice: the labels separated by the | character.
  • Scales, sliders and NPS: a number.
  • Text, number and date: the usual format.

The "duplicate columns" message appears when two different questions carry exactly the same label (for example "Please specify:"). The system then treats them as identical. To fix it, tell the labels apart by adding a space or a word to one of them.

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Good to know Matrix, signature, file attachment and ranking questions cannot be pre-filled. Plan to record those another way if your questionnaire includes any.

  • How do you import your contacts into Evalandgo? (Zoho Desk link to be confirmed)
  • How do you record answers collected on paper? (Zoho Desk link to be confirmed)
  • How do you use conditional questions? (Zoho Desk link to be confirmed)

Need a hand?

Is a file getting stuck, or an import refusing to go through? Our team will help you see clearly. Call us on 04 67 17 96 77 and we will sort it out together.