Updating Animals from CSV

Update Animals from CSV fills in fields on animals you already have. It is the tool for the sheet you got back from the vet, the registry, or the neighbour who kept your records for a year — you map its columns onto Cattle360 fields and it writes them in. Nothing new is ever created.

How to Get There

From the Dashboard, click Update from CSV in the quick actions.

Update vs. Import

Importing is add-only by design. When you need to change animals already in Cattle360, this is the page.

What Your File Needs

One column to say which animal, and a column for each field you want to fill in:

Click Download this example to get that file to type over.

• Your headings are yours. You point each one at a field after you upload.
• Only mapped columns are touched. Extra columns are ignored, so a sheet you keep for another purpose works without editing.
• An empty cell is left alone unless you ask for blanks to clear a field, so a half-finished sheet cannot wipe anything.
• Every animal must already exist.

How to Run an Update

1. Drag your CSV onto the upload box, or click to browse.
2. Set the Identifier Column (in your file) and Match Against (the Cattle360 field it is stored in).
3. Decide whether to tick Treat an empty cell as “clear this field”.
4. In Map your columns, point each column at a field, or leave it on Ignore this column.
5. Click Check File and read the preview.
6. Click Apply Update.

Nothing is written until you click Apply Update. Check File is safe to run as many times as you like.

What You Can Write To

The Write to dropdown groups the choices:

• Animal fields — Ear Tag, Electronic ID (EID), Freeze Brand, Other Tag, Name, Tattoo, Breed, Registration Number, Color, Birth Date, Birth Weight, De-Horned, Retention Date, Retention Payment, Has Brand, and Conception Type.
• Custom fields — every active custom field on your account. They are listed in a card at the top of the page with the values each one accepts.
• Notes — Add as a note attaches the cell’s text to the animal as a note, exactly as if you had typed it on the record.

Each mapped column shows a hint for what it accepts — “A date like 10/23/2019 or 2019-10-23”, “Yes or No”, “A whole number of pounds”, “An amount like 125 or 125.50”. Values are checked the same way the animal form checks them, so a bad value is reported rather than stored.

Two are more forgiving than they look:

• Color takes any color name. One Cattle360 does not know is added to your own color list, just as it is on an import.
• Conception Type accepts the spellings people actually use — Natural, NS, Natural Service, Bull, AI, A.I., Artificial Insemination.

The identifier column is never offered as a target, so the column you match on cannot also be overwritten by the same run.

Clearing a Field

By default an empty cell means “leave this alone”. Tick Treat an empty cell as “clear this field” and an empty cell in a mapped column wipes that field on the animal instead.

Use it deliberately. It is the right setting when your sheet is the authority on a field and blanks genuinely mean “no value”; it is the wrong one for a sheet that is only half filled in. The preview shows exactly which values would go to Empty, so check there before applying.

Reading the Preview

Check File works everything out without writing anything:

• How many rows matched an animal, how many values would change, across how many animals, and how many notes would be added.
• What will change — a table of animal, field, From and To. Long runs show the first batch with a line saying how many will be applied in total.

Three warnings can appear, and all three mean rows are skipped:

• Identifiers that did not match any animal. The value is not in your herd, or it is stored in a different field — try a different Match Against.
• Identifiers that matched more than one animal. There is no way to tell which one was meant. Match on a field where no two animals share a value; when a tag has been reused, that usually means one of your own custom fields.
• Identifiers appearing on more than one row of your file. Skipped so one row cannot silently overwrite the other. Consolidate them into a single row.

Apply Update stays disabled until the preview finds something to change.

After the Update

The result says how many animals were updated, how many values changed and how many notes were added, and repeats any of the three skip warnings. Changes land on each animal’s Activity history the same way a hand edit does, so you can see what the run did per animal.

Tips

• Always run Check File. The before/after table is the whole point — it is much easier to spot a mis-mapped column there than to undo it afterwards.
• Match on something unique. Ambiguous identifiers are the main reason rows get skipped. A custom field is the usual fix — see Custom Fields.
• Start with one column. Map a single field, apply it, confirm it landed, then come back with the full sheet.
• Leave the clear-blanks box unticked unless you have a specific reason. It is the only setting on the page that can remove data.