Making a template from a spreadsheet

The spreadsheet your team already records in can become a template. On Board Templates, Import a spreadsheet reads an Excel workbook and makes one from it, and can make a class from the names in it too. A list for a class you already have goes in through Upload student list on its Students tab instead.

What the workbook needs

• An .xlsx file, up to 3.5 MB; an older .xls is not read, so save a copy as .xlsx first.
• One sheet for each unit, named as you want the unit named. Hidden sheets are passed over.
• A sheet of questions: a row labelled Question with the numbers across it, names down the first column, and rows labelled Lesson and Standard above.
• Or a sheet of skills: a Total Score column, a skill in each column before it, and a row saying what each is out of.
• Only the first 400 rows and 200 columns of a sheet are read; a sheet in neither shape is passed over without a word.

What it asks

1. Choose the file and Upload spreadsheet. Nothing is saved yet.
2. Read What it found, and change Template name or Call its sections here.
3. Under Skills that might be the same, tick only the ones that really are one skill under two names.
4. Read the list of things to know. To make a class as well, leave the tick under Students and give it a Class name and a Term — last year's spreadsheet belongs in last year's term.
5. Where a name is already a child at your school, say whether it is that child, then choose Import as a template.

None of the units are nested, so chapters inside a unit are added afterwards. A question sheet arrives marked Questions, one question to a column and nothing recorded. A skills sheet arrives marked Items, each skill out of the points that sheet gave it, with the children's marks and no words under it to tap.

Two of your templates cannot share a name, so the same workbook imported twice needs a second one. If part of the template cannot be saved, none of it is kept; a class made with it is separate, and whatever did not save is said.

If it will not take the file

It says what is wrong. A workbook with no sheet it recognises, or nothing to score in the ones it does, is refused rather than made into an empty template, and one too big to open asks for a copy of just this class's sheets.