After reserving rooms for an attendee group, a user can import attendees with or without their room assignment. The import will use the attendee group times if the times are missing for an attendee in the import file. If an arrival and departure date and time are not set, verify the import process sets the expected start and end time to the attendee group start and end time.

A user can export a list of rooms reserved for an event to Microsoft Excel. The list can then be provided to the conference organizer to update with attendee information. The conference organizer can enter attendee information, such as gender, birth date, ID, and attendee name. If attribute values need to be set, columns—along with entry values—must be created for each attribute.

Use the following procedure to import attendees:

1.  Select Events from the Conferences menu. The Events page is displayed. Click Select next to the event for which you want to import attendees. The View Event page is displayed.

2.  Click Import Attendees. The Attendee Import page is displayed.

3.  Click Browse to locate the Microsoft Excel sheet of attendees.

4.  Click Import. The attendees on the Excel sheet will be added to the attendee group.

If the system fails to import all attendees, the following message will be displayed: Failed to import all attendees. Click link to review log file. Click the link to open the log file to review error messages.

If the ID column on the report is empty, a new patron record will be created and added as an attendee to the attendee group. The ID will be based on the prefix specified in the Attendee ID prefix field in the System Parameters option and the length defined in Odyssey. If a prefix is not specified, the ID will be based on the length defined in Odyssey.

Name field information is not required for existing patrons for the import. If the name information is missing for a new patron, it will be logged as an error.