SafetyCulture Exporter User Interface

Upvoted! Keen to start using a tool that’s more user-friendly. The support team was fantastic, as they took me step by step on how to use the current exporter tool. It will be even better if it’s available within the SafetyCulture platform.

This feature has been released as announced in the following product update

It’s definitely easier to use with a GUI rather than being a command line tool!

We only have a few sites that have tried it out due to figuring out how to use the data in the CSV files and general lack of awareness about it and its features.  Here is some feedback (bugs and feature requests) that I think would give it more versatility.

• When you complete an export, there is only a Close button.  While this might be fine in most cases, it would be handy to have another button to “perform additional export.”
• The exported CSV files for inspections, inspection items, templates, etc. appends to existing CSV files from the last export.  It would be handy to have an option to “append,” “overwrite,” or “keep old and new separate” so you can handle all cases where you want to add to the existing data, you don’t need the old data it can replace it, or you want both but in separate files so it timestamps the filename.
• The “date range from” shows dates in DD-MM-YYYY which is confusing for the US when we use MM-DD-YYYY.  A “date format” option would be handy.
• The export time zone dropdown has no option other than UTC.
• I would like an option to export the data in a tabular format (i.e. a spreadsheet with the questions as columns) like the new “Excel” export option that exists on the web app Inspections page.  In this export option, you would probably have to place each template’s inspection results into separate template-named CSV files because the questions will be unique to each.  I’m frequently asked for an easy way to get a dump of data from many inspections so we can chart, trend, or share the data.  In the “normalized” format that it exports currently, this is not possible, nor are pivot tables in Excel.  It might be easier and faster for them to use this tool instead of the website, with the added benefit of also being able to get media and reports.
• When exporting Word/PDF reports, it would be ideal to have it create a folder with the template name and place the inspections in that folder. Having it all output to the “export” folder, especially when choosing multiple templates, creates a mass of data with no organization.
• When exporting inspection media, instead of naming the folders by the “audit ID” it would be better to have a folder with the template name, and then subfolders for each inspection named by the inspection name rather than ID. As it is, if I haven’t moved things out of the export folder or select more than one template, I have no way to know what inspection name or template the media came from.
• The progress count for inspection media counts up instead of down. It would be nice if it would go the other direction like the other items do, so you can get an idea of how much longer you need to wait.
• There are times I have gotten a “failed” message on one of the data sets like “inspection items” but it doesn’t explain why so I can correct it.
• There have been times the calendar picker changed my year to 2022 when I only went back a month and selected the date.  Sometimes after I run an export, it doesn’t save that date and shows a date from a previous run or changes the year.
• When exporting inspection items (as well as media and inspections at the same time) for a few templates at once, the inspection items count would ocassionally go down in large steps while it was downloading media. As soon as the media was finished, the inspection items count jumped up to 10,000, then a few seconds later showed complete.  At that time, the “inspection_items.csv” file appeared, but it was blank.  No data was exported.

I have promoted the exporter tool to a few more people recently.  However, the way the data is exported and the folders are named/organized has proven to be a big limitation.  I think it would get much more adoption by looking into some of the items in my previous post.  The biggest hurdles out of that list are:

• no “tabular” Excel format option (like the website inspections Excel export) for data versus the current CSV structure which has limited uses such as Power BI but not useful for viewing directly
• naming folders by audit ID instead of Inspection Title which pinpoints critical details (ID is meaningless in most situations)
• not organizing things into sub folders for each template which makes it hard to find what you want if filtering for more than one at once

Thanks very much for your detailed feedback Corey, we really appreciate it.

Apart from the inspections data, is there other priority data you would get value from having in Excel format rather than CSV?

Inspections is the most useful if it were just like the Excel format on the website Inspections page with all the questions as the first row headers and one row per inspection.  The current “CSV” export is perhaps useful from a database or PowerBI perspective so it should remain for those use cases, but it is not useful to use directly with Excel filters or to create pivot tables and charts. This is because the data is split between inspections and inspections_items CSV files, unlike the single file in the website’s Excel option.

Actions and Issues would also be useful, although the current CSV export format would work fine if it had additional columns.  The Actions CSV export has label ID/name combined into one field which would be better separated, like Issues has for Category ID and Category Label. The timeline is missing, but I don’t think you can really put that into this sort of format. For Issues, I would pull out the (up to 5) probing questions as additional columns.  The only problem is you could have 5 different questions for each category, resulting in up to 50 more columns, most of which will be blank for each Issue.

From an administrative standpoint, Users and Templates could be very useful to me. The data is simple enough that the CSV export format is fine.  However, as it is, the website’s “users list export” is much more useful than the exporter tool due to additional data it includes (and still has less than I’d want). We’d have to be certain that the additional data is secured so we’re not giving details out to users who should not have it.  I’d like to see their creation date, sites, groups, mobile OS, mobile app version, time zone, usage of each major feature, number of inspections (started, completed), number of actions, number of issues, number of heads up, number of owned templates, and several other things.  In Templates, I would want to see some additional details too, like # total inspections (archived, complete, incomplete too), last inspection date, and a few other things.