Import Your School's Entire Master Catalog into SchoolFront Using ExcelTM
Applicable System Roles
Step-by-Step Instructions
Import the Master Catalog Using Excel
1. Login to SchoolFront as an administrator.
2. In the left navigation menu place your mouse over Manage Courses.
3. In the sub-menu click Export/Import Course Catalog. The Course Catalog Import/Export page will open.
4. Click the Excel icon to download an empty data sheet to Excel format.
5. Save the file to somewhere on your local machine (e.g. on your desktop).
6. Open the Excel file where you stored it on your local machine and fill in the information for all courses in your course catalog and then save the file.
| Column Name |
Description / Instructions |
| Identifier |
This is a unique number/letter combination used to identify the course amongst other courses. We suggest you come up with a meaningful and consistent way of IDing master courses.
For example:
If courses are specific to a grade-level, you could come up with the convention "Grade Level-Course Abbreviation". So you would give a course called "1st Grade Mathematics" the Identified or "1-Math." "11th grade Biology" would be "11-Bio."
If you wanted to show progression in courses like Spanish, Spanish I, Spanish II, Spanish III, you could name them:
If your state or other governing body already has standard course identifiers, you can use those.
The convention can be anything you wish--letters only, numbers only, letters & numbers, with or without hyphens--Just try to make it meaningful and consistent so that searching the database will be an intuitive undertaking into the future.
|
| Title |
This is the full name of the course. These names will appear on report cards, transcripts, Teacher Daily Planner, Gradebook, and in the student/parent views for coursework and other academic information. If you want the names translated, enter a translation. |
| Description |
This is the generic description of the course. Note that once sections of the course are created with assigned teachers, each teacher will be able to provide their own course section description. |
| Credit Type |
Cross reference with graduation sets. Open up your graduation sets and determine which credit type the course fulfills.
To look at your graduation sets, go to the following quick nav path: Feature Administration>Graduation Sets>Click Graduation Set>Requirements.
|
| Credits |
Enter the number of credits a student earns by successfully completing the course. |
| Exclude From GPA |
If this is a course like "choir," it may be considered ungraded, or extracurricular. If it is you can optionally exclude it from GPA calculation of students enrolled in the course. |
| Exclude From Report Card |
If this is a course like "choir," it may be considered ungraded, or extracurricular. If it is you can optionally exclude it from inclusion on the report cards of students enrolled in the course. |
| Category |
Choose the category of course. Options include:
- AP
- College
- General
- Honors
- Regents
Note that this will tell the system how to calculate GPA for students who have completed the course. To check category mapping to GPA, go to the following quick nav path: Feature Administration> Grading>GPA Mapping
|
7. Once you are done preparing the Excel file, go back to the same page in SchoolFront, the Course Catalog Import/Export page.
8. Click the Browse button, and find the saved file containing the updates.
9. Click the Preview Import button.
10. You will then be presented the items in the file you created. You can review the information to validate your changes. If there are any required columns missing, they will be listed as errors and the Import Data button will not be available. Extra columns will be listed as warnings and ignored.
11. Click the Import Data button to continue or Cancel Import button to prevent the data from being updated.
12. You will then be presented with the Import Summary, listing the number of rows processed and whether they were skipped, inserted, or updated.
Correct Import Errors & Re-Attempt Import
When the system has finished processing your file, you may also be presented with row-specific errors, should any exist. These errors explain why the system was unable to process some parts of the Excel file.
It will list the row number, column name and the problem with the data. An example of this would be an email address that is not in the proper format.
To get the information with errors into the system, re-open the Excel file, find the rows noted in the errors and make the changes required. Then re-start the process at step 8.