Get started

Bring your lab in

Move your records in: import sheets, add many at once, and check what came in.

About half an hour, once the lab is set up. There are two ways in: Import from Excel for the sheets you already keep, and Add many for a new group you describe once.

1. Make your racks first. Cages → Rack grid → New rack, named as in your sheet and labelled like the stickers on the real racks. Then a sheet with Rack and Position columns puts every cage in its place; anything without a position waits in Unplaced for you to drag on (on a tablet: Move, tap the cage, tap its place).
2. Open Import from Excel. Every database has it in the toolbar above its sheet — Mice, Fish, Plasmids, fly and worm vials, any organism and every inventory. Choose a file (.xlsx, CSV or TSV, up to 15 MB and 5,000 rows) and press Continue. If the workbook has several sheets, pick one above the matches. No template, no renaming columns.
3. Check how the columns were matched. BioManager matches by meaning, not just by name: Position, Slot and Well are the position, DOB and Born the date of birth, Supplier the vendor, Cat. No. the catalogue number. Where a name could mean two things the values decide — a Location of A1, B2… is a position in a box, one of Freezer 2 is a location. Each match says why; change any of them.
4. Nothing is lost unless you say so. A column BioManager doesn't have becomes a new column in an inventory or organism database (if you may configure it), or goes Into the notes as Header: value; choose Leave out to skip it. A must-have column your sheet lacks, like the owner, gets one value for every row — for plasmids and stock, also whether every row is Personal or Lab common (a Lab common column says it row by row). Dates stay as Excel wrote them (3/14/2026, 14/03/2026, 12-May-26): each column decides whether day or month comes first, and when it can't tell, Lab setup's date style does. A date that can't be read, or a birth date in the future, is left blank and kept in the notes. Male, m and ♂ all become M; statuses and people are matched by name. A Cage # typed once and merged down over its mice counts for each of them, and the cages the import makes belong to their mice's owner.
5. Preview, then import. Preview the import runs every row through the same checks as the database's own form and lists any that would be skipped, by its row number in Excel. A Total line under the records is left out, and a mouse whose ID is already taken (in the colony, or by an earlier row) gets the next free one, with yours kept in its notes; the preview says so for each. Import 120 mice (the button counts them) saves the rest as one batch, which Batch history can undo; Change the matches goes back a step.
6. A new group, not a sheet? For mice, Add many describes one mouse and how many, or loads the CSV from its Download a template. In any inventory and in Plasmids, Add many takes a list pasted straight from Excel — one name per line becomes one record each.
7. Print cage cards and put them on the cages. From now on, the spreadsheet is the backup, not the record.