How to Import Your Data

If you’re currently using a digital logbook, such as Logbook Pro for Windows, or a web based logbook, or just an Excel spreadsheet you can switch to LogTen Pro with the confidence that all your data will import seamlessly.

Importing Your Data…

Open your old logbook and export your data to a tab delimited or CSV text file. If your data is on a PC, then you can usually just email the exported file to yourself so you can get it on your Mac.

Now open LogTen Pro, and select “File->Import From File… -> Flights” under the File menu. A standard Open Panel will appear, here’s where you select the file you exported from your old logbook software. Select the file and click Open.

The LogTen Pro import sheet will open, displaying a table. On the right you’ll most likely see a a list of repeating “Do Not Import” items, and on the left the column headings from your data. To import your data you go down the list, and for each item click the “Do Not Import” (they’re menus) and select the appropriate item. e.g. if the first item in your data is “Date”, then you would select “Trip -> Date” from the menu next to the cell where “Date” appears in your data. You can use the left and right arrow at the bottom to page through your data to verify it’s going to the right place.

Make sure you map the aircraft type

If you haven’t already I highly recommend you read this article about how LogTen Pro manages aircraft before proceeding. It is important that the aircraft type (usualy a concatenation of make and model such as B752 for the Boeing 757-200 or C-172 for the Cessna 172) be mapped correctly, as LogTen Pro wants to have only a single entry for each aircraft type and it then links every aircraft of that type to the same aircraft type entry. This is a huge time saver and enables many features down the road.

When you’ve got everything identified correctly, click “Import”, and LogTen Pro will import all your data, and create the necessary relationships between flights and aircraft, crew, airports etc. so you can take advantage of all the great features in LogTen Pro.

Notes specific to Logbook Pro Users

We highly recommend using Logbook Pro’s option to export to Excel, then saving the CSV file from Excel as this can eliminate possible issues if any of your fields, such as Remarks, contain commas.

Route data

Logbook Pro does not track your “from” and “to” airports separately but simply provides a route. When importing make sure you map the route data from Logbook Pro to the “Route” field in LogTen Pro, otherwise you’ll end up with multi-aiport “route” information in your “from” and “to fields which will not be useful.

Times (Such as Departure and Arrival Times)

If you are importing clock times, such as departure and arrival or block times you should check the data exported by Logbook Pro as it may be formatted hh.mm. If this is the case it will not import into LogTen Pro correctly (unless your time format in System Preferencs is set to that).

You need to either reformat those columns in a program like Excel to use hh:mm (note the colon rather than the decimal) before importing. Alternatively you could modify your systems time format to hh.mm in System Preferences -> International -> Formats.