Importing from a spreadsheet

If your library already keeps a list in Excel, that file is the fastest way to a working catalog. Bookleaf imports .xlsx and .csv, and you map your own column headings to its fields — you do not have to rename anything or reorder columns.

Prepare the file

You do not need to clean it perfectly. You do need these three things:

1. One row per title, with a header row at the top.
2. A title column. Everything else is optional; a record with only a title will import.
3. No merged cells in the data rows. Merged cells are the single most common cause of an import that looks fine and produces nonsense.

Delete decorative rows above the header — a school name banner, a blank line, a “Prepared by” line. The header must be the first row.

Columns Bookleaf can use

Your column might be called	Maps to
Title, Book Title, Pamagat	Title
Author, Writer, May-akda	Author
ISBN, ISBN-13	ISBN
Publisher	Publisher
Year, Copyright, Date Published	Year
Subject, Genre, Category	Subject
Copies, Quantity, No. of Copies	Number of copies
Accession, Accession No.	Accession number
Call Number, Call No.	Call number
Location, Shelf, Section	Shelf location

Anything else is ignored. If your file has a column of information Bookleaf has no home for, that is worth telling us about.

Run the import

1. Open Import from the catalog.
2. Choose your file. Bookleaf reads the header row and shows you your columns.
3. Map each column to a Bookleaf field. Leave irrelevant columns unmapped.
4. Review the preview. This shows what will be created — check five or six rows properly, especially ones you know are unusual.
5. Import.

When rows fail

Failed rows are reported individually with the reason, and they do not stop the rest of the import. Nothing is silently dropped.

The usual causes:

A merged cell. The row’s values shift sideways and land in the wrong fields. Unmerge and re-import just those rows.

A copy count that is not a number. 3 copies, three, or 2 (1 lost) cannot be read as a quantity. Put a plain number in the column and move the note elsewhere.

A year that is not a year. c1998, n.d., or 1998-2001 will not parse. 1998 will.

A duplicated accession number. Accession numbers identify one physical copy, so two rows cannot share one. This usually means the spreadsheet has the same book listed twice.

Fix the reported rows in a copy of your file, delete the rows that already imported successfully, and run the import again with just the fixes.

After the import

Two things are worth checking straight away:

Author headings. Import links authors to authority records, but it can only match what your file actually contains — if the spreadsheet has Rizal, José in some rows and Jose Rizal in others, you will get two authorities. Merging them once now is much less work than after six months of circulation.

Copy counts. If your spreadsheet tracked quantity but not individual copies, Bookleaf creates that many copies with sequential numbering and no accession numbers. Add accession numbers and shelf locations as those books pass the desk.

Exporting to a spreadsheet

The catalog goes back out the same way. Export → Export CSV writes one row per title, and Bookleaf chooses the file’s column headings to match its own fields — so if you edit that file and bring it back through Import, the columns are already mapped and there is nothing to match up by hand.

The search box acts as the filter: search first, check the list is what you want, then export. With no search active you get the whole catalog. The material-type chips are not applied — they narrow what you are looking at, not what is written.

Two things the file cannot carry:

Copy-level detail. Accession numbers, barcodes and shelf locations belong to individual copies, and a title with three copies has three of each. The file has a copies column with the count, and nothing more.

Availability. available_copies and is_loanable are there to read, not to re-import: a re-import ignores both columns. Availability is counted from the copies themselves, and whether a title can be borrowed is set on the record.

Use it for a shelf list, an inventory to hand to an administrator, or a working copy to edit in bulk and bring back in. If the destination is another library system, export MARCXML instead.

Importing MARC instead

If you have MARC records — from a supplier, a consortium, or a system you are leaving — import those rather than a spreadsheet. They carry far more structure. See MARC import and export.