Crucial Thought

I have been working tirelessly to upload all my students’ info in preparation for a new semester after the upcoming holiday break.

Since we do so much work on our Moodle, and since I receive over one hundred new students each nine weeks, I need a mass upload solution to input user data. Here is how I have achieved it thus far…

(side note, I have yet to upgrade to the latest version of Ooo, which is version 2.1)

1. I have found that OpenOffice Calc works better than MS Excel for this purpose. It seems to be less fussy about beginning zeros. Some of the randomly generated numbers have one or two zeros at the beginning and Excel cuts them off before I can reformat the cell. So using MS Excel, I would have to add the requisite number of zeros to over two hundred records. OpenOffice doesn’t seem to care. Nice.

2. OpenOffice Calc also handles finding and replacing better than MS Excel. Some of the records need to be reformatted to remove certain characters, and OpenOffice Calc handles that with aces. Even if I were able to conquer problem # 1, Excel loses the battle here as well.

3. So once I get all the data in the format that Moodle wants I upload it and watch it go. One note, and this was a hard lesson to learn. As I go to SAVE AS, and select CSV, it asks for delimiters. The field delimiter has to be a comma (,) and the text delimiter has to be blank. By default, the text delimiter is a quotation mark (“) and it must be deleted. I went rounds with this program trying to figure out what the problem was, and it took me a while to figure out a text delimiter was not necessary. On top of that, once I exported as CSV, it defaulted to open as Excel, so I had to make sure I forced an open with Wordpad, since I’m on my PC.

So those lessons have been learned, and I hope they help others.

I really need to find a multiple user CSV uploader to Drupal. This is the simple reason I have not used my Drupal installation this nine weeks, because it has been remarkably time consuming to manually enter over two hundred accounts waiting for the slow connection between submissions, etc. I looked for one of these before and can recall not having any luck, although I am going to once again take up the search for it. Any help here would be appreciated.
Ultimately I won’t know how successful I have been until the kids come in and I can see how many of their usernames and passwords fail. Assuming my error rate is less than ten percent, I can add those kids on the fly. If there are less than twenty students, stretched across six classes, the average is low per class, at least I hope.

Anyway, all my uploading is done for now. It looks good, although when I changed the name of the course in Moodle, some of my boxes went away, including the most important Social Activies block, and I freaked out before I figured out I could just re-add it. So it came back, and now it’s ok.