Importing name day dates

You add name days to contacts in Quanda by import: export your contacts, look up the name day for each first name in Excel and import the file back. Quanda stores the date in the Anniversary field of the contact, and the Anniversary wish campaign then uses it to send automatic name day emails.

Name days are celebrated in many European countries, for example in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary or the Baltic states, and every country has its own calendar. Quanda does not include a name day calendar in the English interface, so you prepare the table of names and dates yourself, from the official calendar of the country your contacts come from. How to set up the wish campaign itself is described in How to create and set up a birthday and name day email campaign.

How to add name days to the export

The whole procedure takes about 15 minutes.

1. On a separate sheet in Excel, prepare a table with two columns: first name and name day date. Name the range namedays: select it and type namedays into the Name Box to the left above the table.
2. In Quanda, open Contacts and click Bulk Contacts Export at the very bottom below the list.
3. Open the export in Excel via the Data tab, From Text/CSV, with 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) encoding and the Comma delimiter. The article How to open a CSV file in Excel describes it step by step.
4. Click into the second row of the Anniversary column and enter the formula =VLOOKUP(B2,namedays,2,FALSE), where B is the column with the first name.
5. Copy the formula down to all rows with names.

The result looks like this:

The names in your table have to be spelled exactly as in the Name field of your contacts, including accents. Many names also have several name days in some countries. The Anniversary field holds one date per contact, so choose one date for each name in your table.

How to fix wrong values before the import

• A date in another format: select the whole column and choose Home, Number, Format Cells, Date so the result looks like 01.01.2019 or 1.1.2019, with the day first. Quanda does not accept other formats, including the US month first format.
• The value #N/A: the contact has no first name, the name has a typo or it is not in your table. Clear these cells, otherwise the import of the contact ends with an error. You find them quickly with Filter.
• Text other than a date: remove everything from the column that is not a date.

How to import the edited table

1. Save the file as an xlsx workbook or as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited).
2. Open Contacts, Bulk Contacts Import and choose the priority Imported Contacts, otherwise Quanda would skip the existing contacts.
3. When mapping the columns, select only Email (main email) and Anniversary.
4. Finish the import. More details are in the Contact import guide.

After the import, every contact whose first name was found in your table has its name day filled in.

Do you have questions? We will be happy to answer them. Just contact our customer support at +420 605 163 892, e-mail: support@onquanda.com.