Data Export

Denari has a number of levels of security to protect your data and does do a daily back up to guard against catastrophic data loss, however, you may want to keep a local copy of your data. The Data Export feature will allow you to do that.

 

Go to the Reports button on the left/Exports/Export Tables.

 

In the Table to Export field you will see a list of all of the tables that hold your data. Denari, like all major database programs today, is a relational database. That means that data is stored in tables and each table holds information that is related. So for example, there is a table called Donor Names. It holds the information related to donors like their first and last name, contact name, street address, city, state, and zip and well as some other name info. The gifts table will hold gift information and so on. Each table is linked together by a common key and that's how Denari knows which gifts belong to which names, for example. This export feature is not meant to be a reporting function. It won't give you a list of all of your names with their gifts, pledges, classifications, contact records, etc. all in one document. It is intended to give you a way to download your data and if needed, do a data conversion to another software. It is a back up to the back up.

 

You will need to download each table one by one. Select the table then select the Export Type. You have a list of options here. Most of the time you will choose Excel because that's the one that is easiest for most people to view and manipulate. However, a word about the gifts table and Excel. Excel has a built in limit to the number of rows and columns it will display. That is an Excel thing, not a Denari thing. Some organizations have a large number of donors and if each of those donors gave 10 gifts they then have an enormous number of gift records. Each gift record is displayed in Excel on a row so it becomes very easy to exceed the limit that Excel sets. If you open a spreadsheet that exceeds the limit there is no warning. Excel just doesn't show the gifts beyond the cut off. You may think you have all of your gifts, but you don't.

 

So all of that to say that Denari automatically chooses the Tab Delimited option for output for the gifts table. A Tab Delimited file has no limit. It will be difficult for you to view the file but, a reputable software company doing a data conversion will have the tools needed to view the file and retrieve all of your gift records.

 

You will click the Export Data button at the top of the page to download each table one by one. Denari will put a link to the file in your In Box that you can then click to download to your computer. This is a fairly time consuming process and you may want to do this near the end of a day when fewer people are using Denari to speed up that process a little. You won't want to do this on a daily basis but you could do this periodically just as an absolute fall back safety measure.