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Most import problems are decided in the spreadsheet, long before Orgo sees it. This page is what to fix while the file is still open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Built for the person holding an export from an old system, a membership register kept in a spreadsheet, or a list somebody else prepared. Replaces the guesswork of uploading, reading the errors, and trying again.

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Save it as CSV

Orgo reads CSV and TXT files. It does not read Excel workbooks. An .xlsx or .xls file has to be saved as CSV first, and so does an .ods or a Numbers document. Save one sheet per file. A workbook with several tabs becomes a CSV of whichever sheet was active, and the rest is lost silently.
Save as UTF-8 wherever the option exists. Orgo also recognises the older Western European encodings that Excel produces on Windows, but UTF-8 is the only one that carries accented names, Cyrillic and Greek without any guessing. A UTF-8 byte order mark at the start of the file is harmless and is removed for you.

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Keep it under 50 MB

The limit is 50 MB per file. The size is checked in your browser before the upload starts, so an oversized file never leaves your computer: you get “File is larger than the 50 MB import limit” straight away. A CSV of member records is small, so 50 MB is a lot of rows. If you do go past it, split the file:
  1. Open the spreadsheet and split it by row into two or more files, for example rows 1 to 40,000 and rows 40,001 onwards.
  2. Copy the header line into every part. Each file has to carry its own headers.
  3. Upload the parts one after another, mapping each one as its own import.
Splitting is also the faster route for very large files, not only the legal one. A file of a few tens of thousands of rows moves through Orgo noticeably quicker as several parts than as one enormous upload.

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How Orgo reads the file

One header line, then one row per record. No merged cells, no blank spacer rows in the middle, no totals row at the bottom, no notes written above the headers. A spreadsheet meant to be read by a person is rarely a good import file; strip the presentation out of it. The header line is found for you. Blank lines above the header are skipped, and when an import starts Orgo looks through the first ten lines for the row that carries the columns that type needs. What you should still do is put the headers on the first line with content in it, because the mapping screen builds the sheet you see from that line. A title such as “Members export 2026” sitting above the headers will be read as the header row there. The delimiter is detected, not configured. Orgo counts semicolons, commas and tabs on the header line and uses whichever appears most often. That is why the header line matters more than the rest of the file: a header full of punctuation can outvote the real separator. Values that contain the delimiter are fine as long as your spreadsheet quoted them, which every export listed above does. One row is one record. Five rows for the same person are five rows, not one person seen five times, and each of them is processed on its own.

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Column headers are yours to name

This is the change that matters most if you have imported into Orgo before. Your headers no longer have to match Orgo’s field names. You are not renaming Email address to email, or Date of birth to birth_date, before you upload anything. You upload the file as your old system exported it, and then you say on screen which column goes where. E-mail, Correo, Adresa de email and Contact email are all fine, because you point each one at the destination field yourself in the mapping screen. Two things follow from that:
  • Do not rename headers to guess at Orgo’s vocabulary. Leave them as they are. Clear, human headers are easier to map than half-remembered technical ones.
  • Every column needs a header. A column with an empty header cell cannot be mapped, so give it a name, even a rough one, or delete the column.
Headers that do already match Orgo’s names are still worth having: the mapping screen recognises them and pre-selects the destination for you, which leaves less to do by hand. It is a shortcut, not a requirement.
Two columns whose headers differ only by capitals, spaces or hyphens count as the same column, so First Name and first-name collide and only one survives. Give every column a distinct name.

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Values that need care

Most cells are copied across as text and need no thought. These are the ones that quietly do something other than what the spreadsheet looks like it says.
The yes/no rule is the one that catches people out. A column of da and nu, or ja and nein, or Y and N, imports as a column of no’s, and the import reports a clean run because nothing went wrong from its point of view. Convert those columns to yes and no, or to 1 and 0, in the spreadsheet first. A find-and-replace on the column takes a minute and is the single highest-value thing on this page.
Only capitals and spacing are forgiven when a choice is matched. Chess and Chess. are two different options, and so are Football and Fotbal. Tidy the spelling in the column before you import, or you will find near-duplicate options on the field afterwards.

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Start from an example file

Every import type on the Data Import page carries an Example CSV link on its step card, next to the upload button. The example is a real, working file for that type with a handful of demonstration rows. Use one as a template:
  1. Download the example for the type you are importing.
  2. Open it and look at the columns. They are the ones that type understands, written the way Orgo writes them.
  3. Replace the demonstration rows with your own data, keeping the header line.
  4. Save as CSV and upload.
Working this way means your headers already match Orgo’s names, so the mapping screen has almost nothing left to ask you. It is also the quickest way to see what a type expects when the field list is unfamiliar. Any column of your own that the example does not have can simply be added: you will map it when you upload.

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Before you upload

  • The file is saved as CSV or TXT, not as an Excel workbook, and in UTF-8.
  • It is under 50 MB, or it has been split into parts that each carry the header line.
  • The headers sit on the first line with content, with nothing above them.
  • Every column has a header, and no two headers are the same.
  • There is one row per record: no merged cells, no spacer rows, no totals line.
  • Every date column reads 2026-03-14, in that order, for every row including the last ones.
  • Every yes/no column uses yes, 1 or true, and nothing else means yes.
  • Nothing you wanted to erase was left blank, because a blank cell changes nothing.
  • Files about people carry an email column wherever you have addresses.
  • You scrolled to the bottom of the file and checked that the last rows look like the first ones.
That last one is worth the thirty seconds. Exports often start clean and turn messy several thousand rows in, where a different date format or a stray note was pasted years ago.

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Troubleshooting

The limit is 50 MB and it is checked in the browser, so the message appears before anything is uploaded. Split the spreadsheet by row into two or more files, copy the header line into each part, and import the parts one after another. If the file is unexpectedly large for its row count, look for empty columns stretching far to the right, or thousands of empty rows below the data: delete them and export again.
Orgo accepts one date format, 2026-03-14. Everything else, including 14/03/2026 and 14.03.2026, is refused. In the spreadsheet, select the date column and give it a custom format of yyyy-mm-dd, then export again and open the CSV in a text editor to confirm the dates really were written that way. Watch for the case where Excel shows a date but has stored a serial number: the CSV then contains something like 46095, which is not a date to Orgo.
Only true, 1 and yes are read as yes. Any other word, in any language, is stored as no without an error, so the import looks successful. Fix the column in the spreadsheet with a find-and-replace, da to yes and nu to no for example, then import the corrected file. Because a blank cell changes nothing, re-importing the same file with the column corrected will set the values that should be yes.
Orgo needs one. Add a line at the top naming each column. The names are yours to choose, since you map them on screen, so plain words are enough. Also check that nothing sits above that line: a report title, a date stamp or an exported note on line one will be treated as the headers by the mapping screen. Delete those rows and save again.
The separator is chosen by counting semicolons, commas and tabs on the header line. Two things break it. First, punctuation inside the header names themselves, such as a column called Name, first: rename it. Second, a file that mixes separators, usually because it was edited by hand after export. The reliable fix is to open the file in your spreadsheet, check that the columns split correctly there, and export it once more so the whole file uses one separator. In Excel on a computer set to a European locale, prefer the CSV UTF-8 export, which is consistent about what it writes.