Importing people from a file

What the file needs

• The first row must be the column headings.
• Each person needs an email address or a LinkedIn profile. Somebody with neither cannot be reached and is left out.
• First name, last name, email, LinkedIn profile, job title and company are all read. Anything else is ignored, and the preview names what it ignored.

Nothing is written until you have seen it

Reading the file shows you how many are new, how many are already here, and every row that could not be used with the line number and the reason. The first twenty rows are shown with their real values, so you can check that the columns landed where you expected before you commit to anything.

People who are already here are updated only where something was missing. An import never overwrites what is already known, so a job title from a spreadsheet somebody last touched in March cannot replace what LinkedIn told us this week.

What an imported person can receive

An email address can be used as soon as you have connected a mailbox.

A LinkedIn profile address is not, on its own, a way to send somebody a message. Each imported profile has to be read once first, which is a button on the import page and is done ten at a time because each look-up counts against your daily profile view allowance.

LinkedIn will only let you message people you are actually connected to, so anybody who is not already a connection needs a connection request before a play can reach them.