getting your dives in

Help

Most of what people need help with is the same thing: moving years of paper dives into the app without retyping them. That’s a spreadsheet upload, and it goes smoothly once you know the four field types and the five things that quietly break it. All of that is below.

Logbook import Stuck on something else? [email protected]

Contents

Video tutorials

If you’d rather watch than read, the whole app is walked through on YouTube — setting up a trip, the calculators, and the logbook import covered on this page.

Watch the SCUBAzen playlist YouTube · opens in a new tab

Logbook upload templates

Your dives import as spreadsheets. Start from these templates rather than building your own — the column headers have to match exactly, and each file arrives with a filled-in sample row showing the expected format.

The logbook file is the only one that’s required. The other two are optional: use them if you also want to record what kind of dive each one was, or which gear you had with you.

  • Logbook

    The main file: one row per dive. Site, date, depth, times, temperature, pressures, weight, suit thickness, tank and gas details.

    41 columns · 2 sample dives included

    ID, Note, VesselShop, Visibility, air_temp, altitude, belt_weight…

    Download

  • Dive type

    Optional. Tags each dive by kind — reef, wreck, wall, drift, cave, night, training, and so on. Matched to your dives by dive number.

    19 columns · all TRUE/FALSE except the dive number

    ID, cave, cert, commercial, deep, divenumber, drift…

    Download

  • Equipment on dive

    Optional. Records the gear you carried on each dive — BCD, computer, regulator, camera, wetsuit, and the rest. Also matched by dive number.

    23 columns · all TRUE/FALSE except the dive number

    ID, backupcomputer, bcd, camera, compass, diveNumber…

    Download

Field types

Every column expects one of four kinds of value. If a column’s type doesn’t match what’s in it, that upload won’t go through — so it’s worth a scan before you start.

Double
A number with decimals. 22.7
Integer
A whole number. 18
String
Text — letters, numbers, or both. Blue Hole
Boolean
TRUE or FALSE, and it must be capital letters. TRUE “True” and “true” will not be read.

worth knowing first

Five things before you upload

Nearly every import that goes sideways goes sideways for one of these reasons. Two minutes here saves an afternoon of re-checking.

  1. Sort by date and time first

    Dive numbers are generated for you as the file is read. Sort your dives by date and time before uploading so the numbering comes out in the order you actually dived them.

  2. Re-uploading adds, it doesn’t replace

    Running the upload again after dives are already in won’t overwrite anything. Every dive in the file is added to your collection as a new one — so a second run of the same file gives you two of each.

  3. Field types have to match

    A column typed as a number can’t hold text, and a Boolean column needs capitalised TRUE or FALSE. One mismatched cell is enough to stop the upload.

  4. Each header can only be matched once

    Two columns with the same header can’t both be read. If you’ve duplicated one while editing, remove the extra before you upload.

  5. Blank fields are fine

    You don’t need an answer for every column. Anything left empty gets a sensible default, so a half-remembered dive from 2016 is still worth entering.