Import Record into STARS 

WARNING: THIS PROCEDURE SHOULD ONLY BE USED BY THOSE THAT HAVE A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF RATIONAL DATABASE INTEGRITY...

To assist in getting STARS up an running as quickly as possible we realise that many organisation will already have vast amounts of data that could be used within the program.  To assist in this process we have develop a small spreadsheet 'stars-cut-paste.xlsx' where staff competent in computers should easily be able to adapt to meet their needs.

The spreadsheet is in a Microsoft excel xlsx format and users without excel will need to import the file into their own spreadsheet program where possible.  Users having issues opening our excel file should contact us for further assistance.

For a default installation file 'stars-cut-paste.xlsx' can be located in the directory shown below.

Note: Not all fields within a table will be able to be imported, this as STARS being a rational database stores data, which is often duplicated in separate 'linked' tables.  In the example below the core data for Grades and Locations have their own tables and are linked to the Staff table in a one-to-many database relationship.  This means that although each grade and location has lots of specific data, this data is linked to the staff table by a single field, normally referred to as the primary key.  This means when we import records into the staff table, it is unknown what ID was allocated to either the location or grade for any individual staff member, thus these fields need to be entered manually.

The spreadsheet contains several tabs for tables that can have data imported into them.  It is recommended that data is import into STARS in the order the tabs are placed in, working left to right.

It therefore makes sense to populate all the tab sheets with your organization data first.

Each tab contains titled columns that can be pasted into the corresponding STARS table fields.  The tabs are set up of to allow data to be entered into the rows an columns that can be imported with fields limits displayed above the field name.

In this example three rows of data have been added to the Location tab page, in the staff example below 174 record will be imported.

To paste the records into the corresponding table in STARS highlight all the records between the two black lines,

  <Left Side === Data Between Black Lines === Right Side> 

and press the copy icon or Cnt+C keys.  The selected data will then show a flashing dashed line.  

Open STARS and load Locations form

With your mouse click on the * to the left of the bottom half of the split form. When the empty row is highlighted press Cnt+V to paste your records in.

Staff Table example with blank columns fields...

Although empty in the example below these blank fields are essential to ensure your import works.  These blank columns are for linked tables (as described above) for which the data maybe unknown, but must still be consider as existing when importing the field structure into the STARS table structure.

It the example above the blank columns ensure the integrity of the import for the Title, Location, Grade and Team fields.