Coming from a spreadsheet

This page exists because most schools arrive with a spreadsheet, and the honest answer is that this release has no importer. What it has is an order that makes manual entry survivable, and a way to prove the result agrees before anyone relies on it.

What not to do

Do not begin by typing a whole year's marks. A year of marks entered before the structure is right is a year of marks that has to be found and fixed, and the fixing is worse than the entering.

The order that works

1. The year and its terms from the spreadsheet's first row: the reporting periods, named as the school names them.
2. The classes and subjects the year offers, once. A spreadsheet usually repeats them on every row; here they are a list.
3. The students and their placements. This is the bulk of the work, and it is the step where a spreadsheet's duplicated or half-written rows get caught.
4. The teachers and their class-and-subject pairs, so the people who enter marks can see their classes.
5. The grading policy per subject, from whatever the spreadsheet's formulas assumed.
6. One subject's marks, as a test rather than as the migration.

Proving the two agree

Take one subject with marks already in the spreadsheet. Enter them, use the first week check to calculate the result, and compare with the spreadsheet's own answer. If they differ, the difference is a policy decision the spreadsheet made silently, and that is exactly what the product is asking the school to state out loud.

What to do with the old file

Keep it. The product is the record from the term it starts with; the spreadsheet is the record of the years before it, and pretending otherwise is how a school ends up with two half-histories.