Importing animals from a spreadsheet
How to prepare a CSV or Excel file and import a mob of animals at once.
If you already have your stock records in a spreadsheet, you can import them all at once instead of entering each animal manually.
Prepare your spreadsheet
Your file needs a header row with column names. MusterMate recognises many common variations — "Ear Tag", "EarTag", "Tag #", "Visual Tag" all map to the ear tag field. Column order doesn't matter.
- Ear tag — required (e.g. "Ear Tag", "Tag No", "Visual ID")
- Species — cattle, sheep, goat, pig, horse, poultry
- Sex — bull, steer, heifer, cow, ram, ewe, wether, doe, buck, stallion, mare, gelding
- Date of Birth — DD/MM/YYYY (Australian format) or YYYY-MM-DD
- Breed, Colour, Status, NLIS Tag, Name, Paddock, Weight
Export from Excel
- 1In Excel, go to File → Save As
- 2Choose "CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv)"
- 3Save the file
Run the import
- 1Go to Settings
- 2Tap "Import animals from spreadsheet"
- 3Select your CSV file
- 4Review the preview — valid rows are shown in green, skipped rows in amber with the reason
- 5Tap "Import X animals" to confirm
Rows missing an ear tag are skipped. Existing animals with the same ear tag are not duplicated. You can re-import a corrected file safely.
Download the template from the import screen to see exactly which columns are recognised and how to format them.