In general, when somebody asks to download their TRC data as a CSV, it’s often the wrong thing. Once you’ve exported to a CSV, you lose out on the benefits of TRC, including our mobile canvassing apps. It also causes problems like a) how do you keep the downloaded CSV in current with changes; b) how do ensure data collected from that CSV gets uploaded back to your account? And usually there’s a better way to accomplish their scenario…
Exporting as a CSV is almost always the wrong thing. Here’s what you should do instead…
| What do you want to do? | Why exporting a CSV is the wrong thing here: | What should you do instead! |
| Pull into excel to do some filtering / advanced targeting | See above. | Use the Filter plugin. See Targetting for more details. |
| Get a report on how canvassers are doing so far | This is cumbersome to do in a CSV. | Use the Audit reporting plugin. This provides different views all linked together along with mapping visualizations. |
| Pull into excel/access to merge it with other data | Doing the data merge can be difficult, especially when you have a large data set. | Upload the other data with the Data Uploader plugin and let TRC merge it for you. TRC can a) handle multi-million row merges, b) continually refresh if any of the inputs refresh, and c) pull your other data sources from Dropbox. |
| Print a walklist | CSVs exports don’t have a good page-layout for walklists and may have too many extra columns. | Use the existing print feature that provides a PDF – but don’t forget to upload your results! |
| Integrate results back with some other system | CSV swapping is a slow, clunky, and manual process. | Use TRC’s automatic integration for services like NationBuilder, Salesforce, or GOP DataCenter. – which can send up results near instantly with no manual intervention. Contact us for details. |
| Create a snail mail list | You’d still need to de-dup multiple names in an address. | Use TRC’s generate mail export feature, which will create a download that’s already de-duped by address. |
| Share with other people | Once you give somebody a hard file, how do you revoke permission or ensure they don’t misuse or even re-sell it? | Use TRC’s instant sharing feature. This provides a full security and auditing model with revocation ability. |
That said, if you really have a case that you need to download as a CSV, let us know!
