How do I import or export ideas?

Exporting ideas

Exporting ideas will generate an Excel spreadsheet (.xls file) that's downloaded by your browser. Think of this as a one-way trip -- exported data can't be imported again in order to update the idea data it was exported from. Any data that's imported will create a new idea for each item imported.

The spreadsheet that's generated when you export will include the following information for each idea (most of which are pretty self-explanatory):

ID -- the idea's unique ID in the application.
Title
Description
Score -- the idea's score from voting.
Votes -- the number of votes (in both directions).
Comments
Watching -- the number of people who are watching the idea via notifications.
Stage
Author Name
Author Email
Created Date
Other fields -- if other fields are available for ideas, they'll be included in the report.

To export ideas:

Go to the place in the community that has ideas you want to export. (Note that while you can export ideas from the root space, you can't import them to there.)
Under Actions, click Export to Excel.
Under Export Ideas, use the dropdowns to filter the list of ideas down to those you want to export. For example, you might want to Active (Stage) ideas with a score greater than 30 (Score) that were created on or after April 15 (Created).
Click Export.

Importing ideas

Import ideas in order to create a batch of new community ideas from data that's been living outside the community. For example, you might have information in a spreadsheet or a database that you want to import. You import the data as a comma-separated values (CSV) file, which you can easily generate from programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Of the data that you import, only three kinds of information will be used for the new ideas: each idea's title, description, and stage. The rest of the data in the CSV will be ignored.

The CSV format should be as follows, with the names of the imported fields at the top. Only the following headers are valid: subject/title, body/description, and stage.

subject,body,stage 
Idea 1,Idea 1 body,Active 
Idea 2,Idea 2 body,Active 
Idea 3,Idea 3 body,Active

Data that you import always creates a new community idea for each item in the CSV file. (For example, if you import a CSV made from a spreadsheet that you exported, you'll create duplicates of the ideas if they're still in the community.)

To import ideas:

Go to the place in the community where you want the imported ideas to be.
Under Actions, click Import ideas.
Click Choose File to browse for the CSV that has data you want to import as ideas.
Click Upload File.
Under Select columns, choose how you want the categories (also called "columns") from the CSV file to be mapped to the kinds of information in an idea. Under each idea field, next to Use, select the category from your CSV that should map to the field.
You'll be able to choose up to three CSV categories and map them to the Title, Description, and Stage in the ideas the imported data will become. For example, you might have Subject, Notes, and Phase categories in the CSV that you'd map as follows:
- Subject > Title
- Notes > Description
- Phase > Stage
Take a look at the example list of data beneath the mapping to ensure that the values there are what you want imported into that idea field.
Click Accept.
If there aren't any errors in the imported data, new ideas will be created for the data you're importing. If there are errors in the data, you'll be prompted to either enter new data that fixes the error or simply clear the checkbox for that entry so that an idea isn't created from it.