How to import data from Excel or CSV

Isaac Miller

April 27, 2023 19:07

Please import Companies first, followed by People, and then Opportunities.

We only support importing with an Excel or CSV file. We do not support special characters.
If you have team and visibility permissions on, please only have administrators import files. Non admins should not import records as they can create duplicates.
ProTip: Do a test import with 5 records first
If you are exporting from another service, please follow these steps instead.

Step by Step Instructions:

1 - Click on the Menu icon located at the top left corner.

2 - Select System Settings

3 - Navigate to Import Data under Data Management.

4 - Select the data type you want to import. If you are importing from another CRM, please follow the instructions here. Otherwise, continue.

Leads: a lead is a person you have not qualified (ex: contacts through a raffle). Once you have imported your leads, you can click to convert them to a contact and/or an opportunity in our system. After they are clicked to be converted, the company of the lead will show in your companies section, and the person will appear in the people section. Even if you do not create a company for a lead, we automatically create a company when you convert the lead to a person. Delete the company that is created if you do not want to keep it. Click on the image to expand.

Our native/hardcoded fields for Leads:

First name, middle name, last name, prefix, suffix, company, owner, title, work email, personal email, other email, value, source, status, street, city, state, postal code, country, description, work website, personal website, other website, work phone, mobile phone, home phone, other phone, tag, linkedin, twitter, google+, facebook, youtube, quora, foursquare, gravity, other

Companies: the key is email domain. Companies are the top level category. In blue are the hardcoded dropdown options you can add to your sheet before you import.

Our native/hardcoded fields for Companies:

Name, owner, email domain, street, city, state, postal code, country, description, contact type, work website, personal website, other website, work phone, mobile phone, home phone, other phone, tag, linkedin, twitter, google+, facebook, youtube, quora, foursquare, gravity, other

People: People are contacts you would like to do business with, not users in your company account. For People files, the key is email address. Check for duplicate email addresses before importing. In this file, create a column called Company. That is how you will assign companies to people (just make sure they are spelled the same). Click on the image to see more available fields.

Our native/hardcoded fields for People:

First name, middle name, last name, prefix, suffix, company, owner, title, work email, personal email, other email, contact type, street, city, state, postal code, country, description, work website, personal website, other website, work phone, mobile phone, home phone, other phone, tag, linkedin, twitter, google+, facebook, youtube, quora, foursquare, gravity, other

Opportunities: an opportunity is something you want to track through a Pipeline (a step-by-step process you want it to go through). You can add people and companies to opportunities. Areas in purple need to be filled out in order to show in reports.

Our native/hardcoded fields for Opportunities:

Name, pipeline, company, close date, status, primary contact, owner, stage, source, value, priority, win percentage, description, tag

Do you have columns that do not match these names? You can create a custom field before or during import. It you want to add data in bulk, we recommend creating your custom fields before importing. To create a custom field before importing, click how to to learn, otherwise continue to step 5.

Important note: Text fields can not be longer than 255 characters. If you import data that is more than 255 characters into a text fields then the record will not be imported.

Not sure what the character limits are for each field in the spreadsheet above? Here are the character limits for our hardcoded fields:

Field	Type	Filterable?	Character limit	Searchable?	Notes
Name	Text Field/String	No	255	Yes
First Name	Text Field/String	No	250	Yes
Middle Name	Text Field/String	No	250	Yes
Last Name	Text Field/String	No	250	Yes
All address fields	Text Field/String	Yes	255	Yes
Company name	Text Field/String	Yes	255	Yes
Details/description	Text Field/String	Yes	1,000	Yes
Email addresses	Text Field/String	No	255	Yes
Phone numbers	Text Field/String	No	30	Yes	You can import in a comma
Social urls	Text Field/String	No	255	No
Tags	Text Field/String	Yes	50	Yes	Do not import these characters: / and %
Title	Text Field/String	No	255	Yes
Website url	Text Field/String	No	255	No
Email domain	Text Field/String	No	255	Yes
Status	Text Field/String	Yes	255	No
Source	Text Field/String	Yes	255	No
Task name	Text Field/String	Yes	255	Yes

Do you have custom fields?

Below are our limits for custom fields. Our biggest problem is when people create custom fields for the ones we already have above. Please do not create any fields that are above.

More details here on how to use custom fields.

Type	Filterable?	Character limit	Searchable?	How to identify in spreadsheet during import of data
Text Field	No	250	Yes
Text Area	No	10,000	Yes
Dropdown *	Yes	255 for each field	Yes
Date	Yes		No	Dates can be entered in the following formats: MM/DD/YYYY M/DD/YYYY YYYY/DD/MM YYYY/M/DD MM-DD-YYYY M-DD-YYYY YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-M-DD Do not use this for birth date fields. Use number or text fields instead. This field changes per timezone.
Checkbox	Yes		No	This is a boolean value. Put in one column and select true or false, OR you can put 1 for true, or 0 for false
Number Field	Yes	20	No
URL	No	255	No
Percentage	Yes	10	No
Currency	Yes	20	No
Multi-Select Dropdown *	Yes		No	Put in one column and separate with semicolons
Tags	Yes		Yes	Put tags individually in separate columns that are all titled "Tag" and they will be created on import
Description	No	1,000	Yes

How to format a multi select dropdown in a spreadsheet for import:

How to format multiple tags in a spreadsheet:

Want to distinguish between types of emails? You can only do this for People imports. Leads will only take one email address. Put your extra lead emails in custom fields, or the details section and make sure to put them in the hardcoded email areas once you convert them to a person.

Need a list of what countries we import? Please check this guide here

5 - Start by importing Companies.

Choose where you are importing the data from and select either CSV or Excel.

Screen_Shot_2019-06-19_at_3.38.03_PM.png

6 - If you do not have a file to import, or prefer to copy/paste data into our templates, click on the pre-formatted CSV/Excel template to download our data import template. Otherwise, skip to step 9.

Screen_Shot_2019-06-19_at_3.38.14_PM.png

7 - Open the template you just downloaded, copy and paste your data into the file and save.

8 - Go back to the Import page.

9 - Drag-and-drop your file or click ‘Choose File’ to begin to import your data.

10 - Copper will then match the template column headers to fields within Copper. If you did not use the template, or have columns that do not match a field in Copper, you will be given the opportunity to match them. Located the unmatched fields and assign an existing field, ignore the column, or create a new custom field.

11 - Repeat the steps for any other columns that do not match fields in Copper.

12 - Copper will also let you know of any errors in individual cells so you can fix them on-the-fly by clicking Fix.

13 - Fix any cell errors by updating the values or selecting from the dropdown list of options and select Save

14 - Select Continue Import.

15 - Under the import summary, you can rename the import. Click Submit Import to start the import.

16 - You will be taken back to the Import data page where you can see the status of your import (ie. you will see the label “initializing” and once the import starts a progress bar.) When your import is complete you will have the option to see the Summary of the records created.

Made a mistake? Go back to System Settings --> Import Data and click Revert Import, which will delete the import records from Copper. Wait up to 10 minutes before re-importing data.

Importing and Exporting

Step by Step Instructions:

1 - Click on the Menu icon located at the top left corner.

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