Exporting/Importing bases

All right.

Welcome back.

In this lesson I'm going to show you how to import and export your bases in and out of our table. So one thing that's important to note is that the only way you can export all of the data in our table is through CSV stands for comma separated value and what it will do is that it'll take all of these rows and put it into text format separating each cell or column by commas and that can be read by various tools.

The main tool I've seen people export their data to is obviously to excel so Excel reads comma separated value tables and you'll be able to import using CSV as well. So that's really the only means of exchange out and into Airtable. So let's go ahead and export this candidate hiring base into a CSV and then we'll import it back to see how this works.

So to export it into a CSV, all have to do is click on these three little dots to the right of my nav bar and download CSV let's open it up quickly to give it a look. Now I'm using Mac Excel which isn't the best tool out there but you can see it pretty much took all of my data and put it into normal excel. The only issue I'm having is that the attachment field which was CV. Now just simply points to the U.R.L. where I kept that information or where Airtable kept that file. So if I actually go into my base right click there go it will actually pull up that attachment. Now that's simply because Excel does not support this type of field. And that's one of the reasons that Airtable I think is a better tool than excel in a lot of use cases.

Now that we have a base we're familiar with exported into CSV format. Let's go ahead and import it back to understand how this works. So I'm going to add a base to my workspace and I'm an import a spreadsheet. It asks me Do I want to import a CSV and that's what we're going to do. You can also copy paste data from Excel or google sheets and paste it in but we're going to go with the most common way. So I'm going to upload what we just exported. There we go. Upload and we're going to call this candidate imported. Let's go into it.

so the first thing to note is that when you import a CSV it will turn all of your fields into regular single line text fields. And it does that because you cannot recognize differences between the different fields so we have to go ahead and manually change that. So let's do that. And some of the important fields so status was a single select. And what's great is that our table recognizes all of the existing options in that column and tell you whether you want to create a single select with those. That's what we want to do. So we're back to our original field. Same thing with email simply need to change it back to email and our table recognize the e-mails in the field.

One thing to note is that attachments do not work and that's simply because attachments are not a field that work lives in C as V so it doesn't recognize anything. Same thing with currency you can just change this one. Another interesting one is multiple select so Airtable will recognize the different fields that are between the commas that you see in the options and we'll recreate your multiple select as it was originally. There we go.

So we've exported a table into CSV format. That's the only format you can export your data into. And we reimported that CSV into our table and there you just need to do a few manipulations to get back to your original format. If the field is managed in CSV and in our table and at the end of next section I'm going to show you how you can share your table or your base or sections of your table or your base without having to export it into a CSV. So stay tuned for that at the next section.

See you then.