Frequently, OrthoWave Users already work on some other office software applications, in which lots of demographic data, such as name, first name, date of birth, weight, height, address, and global notes are present for hundreds of patients. These data can generally be exported under TXT format which can be read by Excel…
Redo manually all these data entries form after form in OrthoWave would be tedious and not necessary, since OrthoWave features a fancy means of automatically importing this kind of demographic data, which will be thus inserted in the OW data base, upon a very simple and fast procedure thanks to a transfer via Microsoft Excel.
1 – First Step: Open the <template-demographic.xls> file to save it on the hard disk and modify it accordingly while adding data to import.
Click on the icon “Red arrow on diskette” from the “Import Demographics” window. The “template-demographic.xls” document comes up on the browser to be saved anywhere on the hard disk (simply do not forget its location!…)
Then open this Excel file from its location on the hard disk. The Excel file gets displayed, including all items from the OW Patient “Demographics” Window. Above all, please refrain from modifying the headers of columns, or adding columns, or again switch these columns +++
One can thus either manually populate the various cells corresponding to the items that are related to each new patient, or preferably as a first step, prepare the transfer from the previous table so as to exactly fit the format of the template-demographic.xls document, then copy and paste the whole data at once…
Once finalized, the file must be saved upon the .CSV format (and no longer xls), while leaving the same name +++ (which will thus become < template-demographic.csv>). Keep in mind the location where the file has been saved as well. Quit Excel.
By the way, Excel does not like so much files to be saved in any other format as its native one… So several messages will be serially displayed, to keep you warning about this and that… Simply answer “Yes” or “OK” in all cases…
2 – Second step: Import the CSV file including the demographic data of Patients
Click on the “Blue arrow on diskette” from the “Import Demographics” window, locate the place the < template-demographic.csv> has been saved, and open it. The related data and names of Patients to be imported are thus displayed in the table of this window.
3 – Third step: Select the Patients to get demographics imported in OrthoWave
One can either manually select the patients while ticking off the boxes against each of names, and use the “import selection” button, or alternatively import the whole list at once as a batch processing. Please bear in mind that in case of any attempt to input a patient who still exists in the database, a message will come up to replace of not…
All imported patients then belong to the OrthoWave data base and are listed as well in the directory of Patients. Open each of these forms easily can enable confirming all demographic data have been imported successfully.
On the whole, this procedure can be seen as easy to use, fast and efficient. Always keep in mind that two conditions are strictly mandatory, as follows: (1) no change has to be done in the template Excel file, and (2) the modified document to be imported must be save upon csv format.