This article is created for both new and existing Qualee Admins who are using Microsoft Excel to populate the .CSV employee upload template in Qualee.

It is highly recommended that you first read our article on how to Bulk Upload Employees to understand the best practices and procedures that need to be made when uploading a list of employees. See article

Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are two common spreadsheet applications being used globally today and both applications support Comma Separated Values, also known as .CSV.

For Google Sheet users, the common problem when opening their .CSV file via Microsoft Excel is it forces a change of the date value from its original format.

By default, Microsoft Excel follows the user's operating system's time and date format, which also varies depending on what software version you use.

In Qualee, this is one of the reasons why you may have encountered the "Employee Data Upload Error/s" message in Qualee.

This is because column fields in the .CSV employee upload template require a "Date value" following the YYYY-MM-DD date format and these columns include the Date of Birth and Start Date of the employee.

When this .CSV employee upload template is opened/edited using Microsoft Excel, the original format changes to the user's default date format in their application i.e. MM/DD/YYYY, 12-JAN-22, etc.

To resolve this issue, keep in mind that whenever you open/edit the .CSV employee upload template of Qualee, you need to make sure that the Date of Birth and Start Date Column values are following the required format of YYYY-MM-DD

To do this, select and highlight all date values in the spreadsheet and navigate to "Format Cells" to change the date format accordingly.

Once done, save your spreadsheet, but do not close the file yet.

Navigate back to Qualee and go to https://console.qualee.com/admin/employees

Select Add Employees > Upload CSV then locate the file from your local storage.

Closing the file may cause the date values to revert back to Microsoft Excel's default date format which will lead to another error when uploading your employees in Qualee.