Switching from Excel to Colony Management Software: A Step-by-Step Guide
Summary
Moving your colony from spreadsheets to purpose-built software is the single highest-impact change most labs can make. This guide walks through the migration process, preparing your data, importing it into Colony.care, validating the result, and going live, with concrete steps you can follow today.
Step 1: Prepare Your Spreadsheet
Before importing, take an hour to clean your data. Remove empty rows and columns. Make sure each animal has a unique identifier. Separate data into logical sheets, animals in one sheet, cages in another, breeding records in a third. Colony.care's import tool detects column headers automatically, but clean data imports faster.
Step 2: Upload and Map
Save each sheet as a CSV file and upload it to Colony.care. The import tool reads your column headers and suggests field mappings, "Date of Birth" maps to the birth date field, "Strain" maps to strain, and so on. Review the mappings and adjust any that do not look right. You can skip columns you do not need.
Step 3: Dry Run
Colony.care runs a preview import first. You see exactly what will be created, updated, or skipped, row by row. Nothing is written to your live database at this stage. Check a sample of records against your original spreadsheet. If something looks wrong, adjust the mappings and run the preview again.
Step 4: Commit
When the preview looks correct, commit the import. Colony.care creates all the records in one job and gives you a summary: X animals created, Y cages created, Z breeding records created, W rows skipped. If anything went wrong, unlikely after a clean preview, but possible, you can roll the entire import back.
Step 5: Verify and Go Live
Spot-check records in the live system. Print a few QR code cage cards and scan them with a phone to confirm the data comes up. Walk a colleague through the colony in Colony.care. When you are satisfied, start using Colony.care as your primary system and archive the spreadsheet as a backup.
FAQ
How long does migration take?
For a typical academic mouse colony of 200-500 animals, the whole process, preparation through going live, takes 1-2 hours. Larger colonies take proportionally longer.
What if I have data spread across multiple Excel files?
Import them one at a time, animals first. Each animal's sire and dam are linked by ID, including parents imported from an earlier file, and animals are placed in cages that already exist under the same name.