Sometimes it’s necessary to interchange data from and to Priority Matrix. To enable that, we support exporting and importing CSV files. The CSV format is understood by multitude of applications, including your favorite spreadsheet applications, such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

How to export a Priority Matrix project into a CSV file

The steps to export a matrix into an easily shareable CSV file are as follows:

  1. Open your list of projects
  2. Select (double click) the desired project
  3. On the top-right menu, choose “Export as CSV…”

Exporting a Priority Matrix as a CSV file

This step is useful, among other things, to understand the format that Priority Matrix expects when importing data, in the next steps.

How to create a new Priority Matrix project from a CSV file

The steps to create a new Priority Matrix project from a CSV file are simple, too. First, you need to make sure that the CSV file you have contains at least one column titled “name”, and any other fields that you want to utilize should be compatible with the format exported in the previous section. Otherwise, your imported project might not use the values you expect. The easiest way to do this is to export a project into a CSV file, and then take a look at its contents.

  1. Open the Priority Matrix web app
  2. Click the “+ project” button
    Add a new Priority Matrix project
  3. Select “Import CSV”
    Import a CSV file into Priority Matrix
  4. Pick the file that you’d like to import, and see that a new Priority Matrix project is created
    Importing a CSV file into Priority Matrix

How to load a CSV file with items into an existing PM project

The previous section describes how to create a new project from the contents of a CSV file. But if your intention is to load the file into an existing project, follow these steps instead:

  1. Open the project where you’d like to load your CSV file
  2. From the top-right “project details” menu, choose “Import from CSV…”
    Import from CSV into an existing Priority Matrix project
  3. Choose the CSV file and click to open it
  4. After a few moments, the app will start showing you the created items

You can open the project’s feed view to review what happened.

Note on date formats

In the .csv files used by Priority Matrix, dates are indicated in what’s known as “Unix time” or “epoch time”. In short, it’s a number that counts the seconds since January 1, 1970. If you have dates in any other format, see how to convert from and to epoch time.