I was not able to download the .cvs sample on the bulk scheduling tool from either Firefox or Safari. Could you confirm this is functioning properly?

Thanks.

I find the Bulk Scheduling capability extremely convenient and helpful, however there are 2 downfalls I’ve come across so far when scheduling posting to Twitter.

The first relates to the shortened URL. Because it shortens it for you, there is no way to know if you are close to the Twitter character limit, so when posting to TW, it is still necessary to manually shorten the URL if it is a longer post. The second downfall is that the .csv format doesn’t allow for the usage of certain characters (such as #, @, &). So they have to be added back in the ‘Pending Post’ stream.

Please respond with any insight. Thank you.

I've downloaded it, I know now how to fill it in, and I love it.

But there is NO info on what to do with it after I created it!

Can you help? 

Thanks,

Paula

Also, how can I upload a pic so I don't look like the infamous anonymous here?

Paula, maybe we can help each other. I don't know where the sample file you downloaded is, but I do know that when you have a csv file you submit the file as follows:

1. Click in the new tweet window, as if you were going to type a tweet.
2. Don't forget to select which account you're tweeting from (I always forget that, and the owl gets annoyed)
3. Along the bottom there is a little "calendar" icon. Click on it, and a popup window comes up.
4. You can select the date for the individual tweet there, but there's also a big "Bulk Submit" button. Click on that.
5. You'll get another pop-up that lets you browse your hard drive to upload the .CSV file you created. Click "browse" to pick it out on your hard drive, then "submit."
6. At that point, if the CSV file is correctly done, it probably will schedule the tweets. If not, it shows you a list of errors that you need to fix - for example, I had my dates incorrectly formatted, with the year as "10" and not "2010".

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get past that screen, though, because it keeps saying that I have one last error - that my tweets must be scheduled at least 10 minutes from the current time. As all the tweets are at least a day later, I don't know why that error keeps coming up, but maybe if I look at the sample CSV file you mention I can figure it out. Where did you find it?

Good luck - this will be a great feature IF I can get it to work...

Gray

gray@satorimedia.com

If I want to bulk schedule FB posts, will it choose the thumbnail for me on a link?  How would that work?

Paula,

Just click profile on the top right and upload your photo!!!

-B

How do you get excel to save the date with a 0 in front for days of the week that are single digits? I am trying to upload tomorrow which is 05/12/2010, when I load file to excel it doesnt save the date with the 0 in front.  

Hi, I am new to using HootSuite. I cannot make the bulk scheduling work. I want to put a whole month of updates for twitter and facebook on an excel doc and then upload. I either get a lot of errors, or that the date or time is wrong.

Any guidence would be great. I have downloaded the sample file, even tried to upload it again with corrected dates as a test, and that failed. I must be dong something wrong.

Let me know what I can do to fix this.

Suzanne

Vinny - The answer is, you can't. Or, at least, I can't find a way to do it with either excel or Apple's Numbers. That's because the formatting on the cel is considered to be a date, and both programs will "helpfully" change them to what they think you intended. The only solution I found was to format the cels as "text" in excel. Then you type in whatever you'd like.

Suzanne - I'm betting that when you tried to upload the "sample" file you didn't change the first date, and since the dates have to be past the present, it rejected the file. I tried using the sample as a template to create a new CSV, but something about the way Excel re-formats things made it not work.

The way I finally got it to work was to open the sample .csv file in TextEdit (or NotePad on a PC) and simply cut-and-paste new dates, messages, and URLs into the sample file, re-save it and re-upload it. I think next time (I've got several months of tweets to create for a client) I'm going to skip the excel entirely and do it in TextEdit.

Bulk Submit is a nice feature, but it's not nearly as simple as the directions make it out to be, unfortunately.

Thanks Graydancer I will try that, much appreciated

Hello,

I like the idea of bulk posting, however I want to know if I can post the same 2 messages everyday?

Thanks

Got it to work finally, it seemed there was an extra space after the date and the time. Once you get a template set that works you are good to go.

Hi,

I am actually very disappointed how you guys implemented batch upload.

First, I got problem uploading this simple file:

19/12/2010 14:00,"Cool project","http://mysite.com"
31/12/2010 23:55,"Happy New Year! Have a great and prosperous 2011!",
I got scheduled only first line, it never went into second one. I was comparing my file with your sample, but could not find any difference.

I tried different files, Excel, TextMate. Could not find any special character that may break it.

You know, .csv files are so easy to work with on your site, so I don't get it how it possible to have so many bugs. I am a professional software developer, and parsing comma delimited file is a simple programming task, it should be done perfect and easy to use for end user.

Second, why is so hard to make it mm/dd/yyyy for US? I specify in profile my date time is Eastern US time, but in file I have to work like I am in Europe. I can easily use Google spreadsheet to generate this file, but they don't have dd/mm/yyy format.

0 or not 0 in front of day/month - give me a break. I can't belive your programmers can't handle this. User should not care about it. 05/12/2010 is the same as 5/12/2010.

I also noticed the same item can be uploaded twice if I do it in 2 different bulk updates. Why don't allow people to have a big file but post only new items?

"Bulk Submit is a nice feature, but it's not nearly as simple as the directions make it out to be, unfortunately." from Gradancer - it need to be very simple so even my granma can do it. I don't want to spend time on it, considering it is a Pro (paid) feature.  Looks like some testing/alpha release to me.

Regarding date formatting in Excel...

In Excel, right click on the date column. Select "format Cells".

Inside of the Category field, select "Custom".

Looking to the right, you'll see a field for Type:... Enter the following in that field.

dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

...then click ok

-----

This will force the proper date format, while allowing you to enter the values in Western time formats.

Hope this helps everyone.

I finally got it to work except when you don't have a URL it seems to not schedule anything past the blank url cell. WTH!

Hi,

I can't get it to work.   Even when I upload the sample file provided by HS!

I have a mac.

Shaun

Cool! After reading the comments here I changed my tweets to a notepad file and viola! :)

Just tried Bulk schedule feature.   so hard to format correctly, got 20 error messages.  Reformat Cell in Excel to Text or Custom works to keep the zero.  Finally my .csv went through but then it only scheduled one message not all three i was testing.  Will try the text edit next time I have an hour to waste.  Not a time saver yet, but looking forward to this functioning. on a mac.

How does the Bulk Upload feature work for Facebook posts for choosing the thumbnail image that gets published with a link? Many times the default image is not appropriate to post. Thank you.

Jessica

Here is the screen shot of my error messages...

I just tried batch upload of 11 tweets. I used the sample file exactly as it was downloaded and had several (more than five) rounds of rejecting my dates for being incorrect. Once that frustration was complete and the file uploaded... I found a confirmation message that suggested that one message was scheduled. I cannot figure out where the other ten messages went, if anywhere, because there were not additional details (nor do I see it in my hootsuite window as pending messages). After nearly 40 minutes of using this time-saver, I'm flummoxed. Help!

I think that Vinny may have hit the nail on the head when he talked about there being an extra "space" after each line in the exported excel CSV file. I think that might be what makes the second message show up (something I ran into a lot until I started cutting/pasting on the sample file using TextEdit.

I'm also in agreement with Eugene. I'm not even a programmer, and I think I could create a parsing code that would make it easier to format. These little problems we're finding by trial and error just aren't cutting it.

Heather, Shaun, I'd just recommend you open the CSV in a simple word processor (Notepad or TextEdit) and cut and paste carefully. Make sure there are no spaces after each line, and check to make sure the dates are formatted correctly. I know that when I got the dates right on the sample, it did upload the "no URL" message, so that should work if you follow the sample file.

And at some point when I get some time I plan on writing a blog post about how I got it to work, plus some of the tips here, so maybe we can help other people get it right the first time.

Solution for the problem of Hootsuite.com scheduling only one first message out of batch of several on Mac OS

I had problems when I created 10 tweet according to specification but only first one was accepted. Meassage was something "1 tweet is scheduled". Other 9 was simply ignored.

Reason. It turn to be a problem with End Of Line character on Mac OS. Hootsite server does not like it and thing the whole file contain one long line.

The simple solution so far I found is:

1. Download the plain text editor for mac - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/8724/plain-text-editor

2. If you saved your file as .cvs from Excel, open it in this editor. Or you can start typing your batch here from scratch.

3. Important. Go to Edit menu -> Change End of Lines and select Unix. ( I did not test Windows yet). this step will change end of line into format hootsuite understand.

4. Optional: You can Activate/Deactivate wrapping in the same menu to see your file lines alight properly.

5. Save the document . Extension does not matter. I saved as .txt and hootsuite was happy with it.

6. Upload your batch.

This was working for me.

Technical:

I use vi to compare files before and after:

File before Plain Text Manipulation:

vi tweeter.cvs

10/12/2010 10:00,5 quick tips to make a great pictures of a beach and coast,http://allaexpression.com/blog/5-quick-tips-for-coastal-and-beach-p... 23:55,Happy New Year! Have a great and prosperous 2011!,^M16/12/2010 14:00,Seashell project decorative Christmas cross in 5 easy steps,http://allaexpression.com/blog/how-to-make-decorative-cross-with-se...

after manipulation:

vi tweeter2.cvs

10/12/2010 10:00,5 quick tips to make a great pictures of a beach and coast,http://allaexpression.com/blog/5-quick-tips-for-coastal-and-beach-p...
31/12/2010 23:55,Happy New Year! Have a great and prosperous 2011!,
16/12/2010 14:00,Seashell project decorative Christmas cross in 5 easy steps,http://allaexpression.com/blog/how-to-make-decorative-cross-with-se...
14/12/2010 10:00,Christmas tree decoration DIY cross with seashells in 5 easy steps #DIY #handmade,http://allaexpression.com/blog/how-to-make-decorative-cross-with-se...

By the way, you can leave empty last sell, where URL should be, just make sure you have trailing comma at the end of line.

31/12/2010 23:55,Happy New Year! Have a great and prosperous 2011!,

Eugene, if I could buy you a beer (or the beverage of your choice) I would. I'm going to try this with TextWrangler (since I don't have plain-text-editor yet) but if that doesn't work, I'll be following your steps to the letter.

Thanks!

Yes! I had to use my text editor and NOT the excel program. Now I'm all set. 11 tweets tweeted. And a partridge in a pear tree.

Eugene, everyone else:

TextWrangler also worked fine to export the CSV. I've managed to do two bulk batches of tweets with no problem.

However, I have had problems viewing the tweets past Dec. 31, 2010 either on the Hootsuite page (using FireFox) or on the iPhone app. Anything past Dec. 31 just scrolls and scrolls, repeating the Dec. tweets and not showing any for January.

I should emphasize, it accepted the January scheduled tweets. It just won't show them.

Anyone else run into this problem?

Gray

One minor problem:  The URLs I had in my .csv file had already been shortened using Twitter's URL shortening service.  The bulk scheduling has now converted them to ow.ly versions.  So a single URL is now going through two shortening services.  Isn't the system smart enough to recognize if a URL has already been shortened, and not use the ow.ly service if this is the case?  It should be pretty straightforward to filter for the major shortening services.

Bruce

Bruce,

Even if the system doesn't figure it out, the URLs will still follow each other. Though I did have a weird couple of URL's with "31" appended to them, the ones I use already were shortened via notlong.com. Once I worked out the necessities of the .CSV (using the notlong URLs) they were further shortened...but they all still worked.

Of course, that was just me. Let us know if you have more trouble.

Gray

Hi. My first Bulk upload went off without a hitch- 50 tweets in a couple clicks- very sweet. However, when I tried to do a second batch for my second account, MAJOR issue. I've spent DAYS trying to get them to format and upload correctly with no luck. I, too, am on a Mac, so perhaps that's the issue? I know how to use Excel pretty well; changed my date formats to fit the dd/mm/yyyy h:mm, put the messages in column b, the urls in column c, and saved as CSV format, but it still tells me "invalid date" or "interval must be set to 5  (or 10 minutes yesterday) minutes". I even tried compressing the info from all three columns into one and manually adding the comas, and/or the quotations marks- no luck. 

Signed, 

Please Help Before I'm Bald and on Thorazine

Just tried another round today, and now it will accept the spreadsheet, but only publishes ONE tweet. :) It's an improvement! 

Lauren,

Try modifying your file with plain text editor for mac. I wrote about this issue before in this forum thread. The problem is with end of line character on mac.

Thanks, everyone, for your trouble-shooting!  I'm a Mac user, and have been struggling with my attempts at this today!  The Hootsuite help desk pointed me here to Eugene's posts.  Thanks, Eugene.

Originally, I was saving an excel file in .csv format, and Hootsuite was only seeing the 1st of my 4 posts.

But now, after reading these suggestions, I've used Mac's TextEdit. That has solved the 'extra character' issue, but it's still not full working. Now Hootsuite is 'seeing' 2 out of my 4 posts.  I'm not sure why the remaining 2 posts aren't uploading successfully.  There doesn't appear to be any extra spaces at the end of my lines.

Any thoughts???

Hi Brad,

I checked TextEdit - it does not specify what kind of "end of line" character it puts when saving files. Try Format - Make Plain Text but doubt it will work.

Something not right after your second line.

I would suggest to download plain  text editor and make sure you use Unix character for string delimiter as described above in my post.

this is absolutely the  worst thing i have ever tried with hootsuite, i have been working on this for days with no success.  I tried to change the date format, I even used your spreadsheet and manually re-entered the dates and it still won't work.  1st thing in your example spreadsheet the first few lines are formatted properly but the rest are not. 2nd in most excel spreadsheets if you have a date in a cell, click and drag it down the column it automatically puts in the sequential date, with this format it does not do that, so you have to literally enter each date by hand.  don't you think that in the year 2010 there would be an easier way to do this?  Perhaps you should schedule a webinar to show people how to use this or come up with a more intuitive way to do this. Or, have a form built in to your platform that allows us to fill in the blanks and not use excel which obviously complicates things. i will not be using this feature nor will i recommend my clients use it until you get it fixed.

Are these tweets supposed show up in the "Pending Tweets" column? Can you delete bulk messages?

Submitted via blog by "zerko"

I am a French-speaking user of Hootsuite, and I experience an important problem with the new Bulk Update feature: it does note allow to use accentuated characters in the scheduled statuses… I tried to convert them to Unicode and, even if it then seemed to be correctly scheduled, it was finally displayed with the Unicode numerical character references (like é…) on the social networks pages… Could you please fix this bug that prevent French-speaking users to use this awesome new feature? Thanks a lot in advance!

This is not a good showing for my fav twitter client.  When it was free, I could understand crap customer service.  You get what you pay for.

Now, I'm paying.   I don't expect a feature to be rolled out for me to pay with my valuable time to try to fix for HS.

Not a happy paying customer.

@ShaunDakin

Submitted via blog by john

I keep getting an error message when I try to upload a .csv file with bulk uploads. I am not able to figure out what I am doing wrong. I am preparing my bulk uploads in EXCEL but find the formatting inconsistent with the cell format options offered by EXCEL.

Can someone please help?

@JDMarvin

I continue to get an error on the date field - even after downloading the template ... and changing the format to DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM - excel adds an AM or PM after the MM ... Help!!!

So are only mac users having a problem with it?  I think I'll wait to try again until I can use my PC if that's the case. I have like 40 clients I'd like to bulk upload and not one of them will fire me if I wait a few days.  

The trouble with using the mac text editor (for me) is that it's so tedious, I think I'd go blind staring at the screen, looking for wayward spaces and missing parenthesis. I'm using it for FB statuses, so length isn't a big concern. For Twitter, though it would be troublesome to not have a visible 120 char limit.  

I'm surprised by people's angry comments, though.  Honestly, this is a badass feature and of course there will be kinks at first, you weren't DEPENDING on this, were you? It wasn't in your contract when you agreed to pay for the service. It's a perk,a  bonus, a treat and I'm so grateful that it's here. I can't wait to play with it more. I know and trust that the HootSuite techs are trying to find a way to make sure the tool is effective and accessible. I think they're on the right track with CSV, too.  Keep up the great work, guys :)

The format problem I seem to be encountering is that it will not accept hours before 10:00. Example, it won't accept 09:00. It doesn't seem to like the 0.

I am a P.C. User.  At first they said, I had errors when I uploaded the messages. I fixed them.  The upload worked and scheduled, but without my URL's. Help!  I saved them in .csv. and an error message came up that everything would not convert into the .CSV format. Will any other format work?

I finally got my issues resolved using the format in the attached excel workbook. My problem was due to an extra space between the date and time.

I'm on a Mac, used Excel then pasted into numbers. I made sure to not exceed the characters limits by staying under 120 characters (since shortened links can be around 18) by using the =len() file. When I copy and paste over to .CSV I keep getting errors. Does the program not allow special characters? @ ! ' or - ? 

I tried writing out the code myself, instead of the columns - including the date,"message","url" > I keep getting errors. Even when I remove special characters... hmmm...

I can schedule the bulk messages with no issues using the CSV sample as a template, However, none of the links are working correctly.  We want to use this primarily for bulk scheduling Facebook posts.  Would it be better to shrink the urls first?

Appreciate the feedback but my posts are working without the quotation marks. I think I'll leave it aloone since it is working!

Thanks, keep up the good work!

I was able to overcome alot of the formatting issues with excel by using the custom field formatting feature and doing this:

Instead of: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

Use this: d/m/yyyyy h:mm

Seems like a strange fix, but it helped with the invalid date string errors...

Now I am having issues scheduling between 1am and 10 am...but I am sure that is achievable too...

Uggh- I'm getting errors STILL, I think they're from using commas within the update.

Please don't tell me that I need to forego proper punctuation in order to use this feature.

1) Might I suggest to people who are having formatting problems with their CSV file that they try using the spreadsheet program at Google Docs. I use that for my daily bulk posting, and it obviously puts the quotation marks where they're supposed to be automatically, because I never have a formatting issue.

2) I've seen two prior questions about Facebook thumbnails, and mine will be the third. Could someone PLEASE answer this? How can I specify the image I want used as the thumbnail for FB bulk scheduling? The first image is NEVER the image I want to use (usually our logo). 

I'll add to Lisa's question: is there a way to escape commas so that they don't mess up the csv file? Does \, work?

I just managed to work through  a bulk upload on an account that I manage however, after the messages have been imported I noticed a number of them have been ramdomly edited/shortened. As far as I can tell I don't have any formatting errors but I can't seem to figure out what's happening.

Any suggestions?

Hi Captain Support,
Thanks for the offer to look at the excel doc for bulk uploads. Attached is my text document. I did reply to the email but not sure if you check that as it states noreply.

Still no luck.

It cannot be this difficult. I would like to get this working as I would like to recommend that we use it for my job as it will be very handy to use bulk messaging as it would make life so much easier and save time.

Any advice would be great. Thanks in advance. ( Sorry could only attach one file)

Suzanne

I really appreciate this feature and have found it most useful. It gave me some trouble initially BUT it was because I did not make an effort to understand the errors given! After some time - I got it to work well... I am on my second day. THANK you!

My question is - after I have scheduled my first 50 messages, Can I schedule another 50 before the first have been used up (i.e. sent)? In otherwords, Can I schedule consecutive batches of 50 while observing the rule on time slots and no repeat messages? If so, how many batches of 50 can I schedule?

Greetings from Nairobi!

Bulk scheduling has saved me so much time!  I'm having one problem though.  MOst of my accounts can be scheduled for a week at a time but certain ones need to be scheduled every day.  I'm getting this error message only on certain accounts: New pending messages can not be scheduled using the same text as existing pending messages.

I'm not sure why I get this on certain accounts.  Is there any way I can fix this? 

Will anyone be answering the question regarding POSTING TO FACEBOOK PAGES and which THUMBNAIL it will use?

We have noticed that any schedule Facebook page posts have NOT been posted Thumbnail previews.

Thanks

Matt,

HooplaAgency.com

I just want to say thank you to everyone who has posted their frustrations here.  I have been waiting to try it based on everyone's comments and I'm glad I did! Good luck to everyone that it works the right way soon!

I second Hoopla Vancouver in regards to posting thumbnails on FB Pages. We can't use this bulk utility because we *always* post the same messages on both Facebook and Twitter.

Jessica

We wanted to add, for those that are curious, the service works great for us MAC users as long as you use TEXTEDIT.

When you are about to save your file, you must remember to go to the menu and convert it all to PLAIN TEXT. You have to do this because pasting in URLs will immediately move the document over to Rich Text, which is not supported by CVN.

Then save as 'filename.csv'. 

If anyone needs help on this - absoutely free and this is not a pitch - drop us an email at our GMAIL and we can help with the file hooplaagency (at) gmail. . There are so many small things that can go wrong.

Matt,

Hoopla Agency

What's the timezone that the server runs on? It would *really* be nice if it showed the current server time on the bulk upload pop-up. It would make testing it so much easier.

Jesse,

I don't believe it's based on the server time, it's based on the timezone for your account. You set that on Twitter.com for each account.

Then again, I only use this for one client right now, so it's possible that they just happen to be in the same timezone as the HootSuite Servers.

Gray

OK, the timezone is PST. But, even if you set the time more than five minutes in to the future, it still spits out a time error. It has to be like over 15 minutes in the future for it to work. The time was the ONLY error I got. It's so freaking easy to get this to work, and I'm on a Macintosh!!!

Like others, i'm finding this feature incredibly helpful for Twitter, but would like some idea of when Facebook integration will be a bit better. Posting a thumbnail and excerpt is pretty important if you want to grab attention of those seeing your posts in their mini-feed... and missing this functionality makes bulk scheduling for Facebook pretty worthless.

Why does it not recognize the quotation marks as being string identifiers?

Most programs I use that have import capabilities recognize that all content between the quotation marks is supposed to be treated as a single string. Not the bulk import... it treats "February 16, 2011" as being a string consisting of the month and date and a second string consisting of the year. It's not so annoying, I can reformat the dates to not use commas ( 16-Feb-11, for example). But if I have a quotation that I am tweeting such as "The cornerstones of the organization are Honesty, Service, and Poverty." It would treat this as three strings.

I can be grammatically incorrect, I suppose and use some other character instead of the comma, but the comma is the correct punctuation mark to use. How hard, I ask, would it be to read this question if I were not able to use the correct punctuation?

Any fix for this?

Thanks!

Don

This may sound terribly elementary, but I just realized I needed to save this as a .csv file.  Duh!  Once I made that selection, it worked just fine.  

First off, thanks Hootsuite for the bulk post - I have been dreaming of a way to upload a flat file for quite some time now.  It isn't perfect but it is better than manually scheduling posts, so thank you. 

I feel for all the folks that are having issues, but my first two batch posts worked great!  I am Win 7 user and created my CSV file in Excel 2010, no issues so long as you do the following:

• Save it as a .csv
• format the date/time correctly - in Excel select the entire date/time column, right click and select Format Cells.  Select Custom under category, highlight one of the custom formats on the right and type the following in the Type box:  dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm Click OK and your date/time column should be formatted correctly. 
• Don't pre-shorten your URLs

Good luck!

Hootsuite - please add this to a list of wishes for the next phase of bulk editing:

• Select multiple social media accounts with one post, much like the scheduling is done for single posts
• Figure out a way to add thumbnails to FB posts and description texts - that would be dreamy

Hi, 
I am having an issue with excel allowing me to put the correct date format in for next year.  When i put in for example 01/01/2011 00:00 the excel format ads AM (1/1/2011  12:00:00 AM) to the end of the data.  I have reformatted the cells every way i can think of and nothing changes.  Any ideas? 

I purchased Hootsuite the other day to try out the bulk updater!  It is not working!  I tried uploading the CSV sample download and got error messages with that too.  Any suggestions? 

given i am new here, i have some questions - with scheduling, can free members schedule something each day or is that bulk scheduling/for paying members?  do you see when the scheduled message has gone?  this uploading excel, and files is that for your clients or is that to post onto your twitter, fb, linkedin, myspace, etc.

sorry i am very confused.

my other issue is hootly for shortening urls - how do you select it as it is defaulting to owly and i don't want that option or is it to do with free and paying members?

Hello All,

We were using the bulk upload just fine, until the New Year. Now, when we do a save or save as in .csv it reverts the date and time to the date format.  We then have to switch it back to custom number setting. Does anyone have an answer for this?

I would just like to know where I can view the items that are going to post from my batch file can be found so that I can edit them if needed or delete some if I don't want them to post after all. I assumed that they would be saved as drafts but nothing is popping up in that area even if I have the correct account selected. Is it hidden some where else?

Thanks

To make your date & time column automatically format properly, do this:

1. highlight your date & time column in your csv spreadsheet
2. on the home tab click Format and then on the drop-down menu click Format Cells
3. under Category, choose Custom
4. under Type: manually type this string into the window: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm
5. Click OK

Now when you type a date & time it will automatically appear in the proper format, even if you enter a date in the USA way, i.e. if you enter 5/1/11, it will go into the cell as 01/05/2011.  You do need to enter time as military time, though.  Otherwise, the system will assume it's AM.

Ann, I've been formatting the date & time column exactly as you suggested, but when I save and close the file then open it again, I find the date & time have changed back to single digits, e.g. 10/1/2011 8:00, and when I open the Format menu, I find that has changed to.

Note: when I'm saving I get the message: filename may contain features that are not compatible with CSV. Do you want to keep the workbook in this format?

- To keep the format which leaves out any incompatible features, click yes.

- To preserve the features, click No. Then save a copy in the latest Excel format.

I've been choosing "Yes" because I need to upload it as a CSV file.

What should I do so the custom formatting doesn't change when I close the file?

Reem and others - I can make a suggestion here to help with this because I have the same issues. 

1. In the properly formatted spreadsheet to the right of the URL column, I list the date (don't worry about the formatting, just make sure the column cells are formatted as date)
2. Next to the date column I list the time
3. In column A - where the properly formatted date and time are to be placed, create the following formula:  =TEXT(cell reference,"dd/mm/yyyy")&" "&TEXT(cell reference,"hh:mm").
   
   So if column A was the date and time properly formatted for the bulk scheduler, column B was your text, column C was the URL, then column D would be the date, and E would be the time of the post and your formula would be:  =TEXT(D1,"dd/mm/yyyy")&" "&TEXT(E1,"hh:mm")
   
   So in column A, drag the formula down from the first post to your last and the cell references should change accordingly.

Now you should have a properly formatted date and time.  if you want to make a change to the date or time, do NOT click into column A, change it in column D or E.

You also don't have to delete columns d & e - the scheduler seems to ignore them.

Good luck

Nancy,

Thanks for your help but I'm still having the same problem as Reem.  Every time I close out of Excel, the format converts back to 10/1/11.  If it helps, I'm using Excel 2008 for Mac.  Does anyone know how to solve this problem of the cells Auto formatting back to the wrong format?

Thanks, Ashley.

Ashley  - I read earlier that Excel for Mac has had some issues.  It shouldn't change format if you do the folliwng:

Try selecting column A and format all the cells as Text.

When you concatenate the date and time with the formula try doing it in a seperate cell - for instance, cell F and then copy and select column A and  Paste Special > Values & Formats.

See if that works better for you. 

For what it's worth, I finally got it to work by doing the following:

1. Start with a fresh spreadsheet. Do not use the sample CSV file that HootSuite provides if you plan to use a spreadsheet program like Excel. Excel does some sort of auto-formatting (which I have yet to figure out how to disable) that makes the CSV-XLS-CSV formatting unpredictable.
2. Format cells as General Text. Do not use auto-formatting for your time stamp column. This also seems to cause unpredictability in the XLS-CSV conversion. Some users suggested using the Date format in Excel, but I could not get a consistent result doing that. 
3. Save two versions of your spreadsheet. Work with your content in a document saved as an Excel spreadsheet (XLS or XLSX) until you're ready to upload. Then save it as CSV.

I posted to my blog with more background and details if you're interested in the long-winded explanation: http://communicationmatters.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/hootsuite-bulk...

Yes, I see the problem if you follow my above suggestion and then save as a csv.  So I tried following my method, which streamlines entering the date, and then once I was done I highlighted the date/time column and clicked format cells and then formatted as text.  What happened was most cells stayed the same but the first 4 and the last 1 (out of 50) changed to a meaningless string of digits.  I had to change those manually.  Then I saved the whole file as a csv and it seemed to work fine. Haven't uploaded it to Hootsuite yet, though, so I don't know if it will work without glitches!

Now I'm getting the error saying that messages must be scheduled for at least 10 minutes from now. My messages are for days from now. Please review my .csv and let me know what I'm doing wrong!

What finally worked for me is first formatting the date & time column as text, (when I do it in the end, all the cells change to meaningless strings of digits), then typing the date and time in the correct format. I just uploaded a file that way and it worked.

Thank you!! I was so caught up in the date/time formatting mishegas that I failed to notice that. The fog is clearing - successfully scheduled the messages! Sweet.

I cannot make this work.  I've tried to upload the attached file and the error message says messages must be scheduled 5 minutes apart - but ALL of them are!  It also says line 4 is too long.  I then shortened all of my urls, thinking perhaps the system counted length BEFORE shortening URLS automatically, and it still said line 4 is too long.  How do I make this work?

Eooowwww! I see the problem - the messages must be scheduled on the 5-minutes increments on the clock, i.e. 10:05, 11:30, 17:55  - no scheduling at 17:43, for example.  I went back and changed all my minutes to be multiples of 5 and it worked!

I just had a successful upload to the bulk scheduler with notepad.  I put quotes around the date and time which is different from the suggested format.

Format: "DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM", "MESSAGE"  "URL"

I still am not having luck with Excel.  Even when I format the first column to general, I still get an error message with the time/date.

Teresa, thank you! You get my gold star of the day - simple solution that can be achieved by pasting all your spreadsheet entries into a Notepad file. Looks like we do not need the quotes around the URL. Watch the extra spaces Excel 2007 wants to insert between the date and time.

I created a file with Google Docs (Calc) downloaded as a CSV file - which all looks fine and hopefully formatted correctly

However when I upload the file into HS - I get no errors but the tweet that is generated, its simply a link to my downloaded file is ready for posting from HS - with no other content (date/time/tweet/url)

What am I doing wrong?

OK.

Here is the attached version of my comment which you've deleted.

I've clearly proved that your service is [Useless and Waste of Time and Money.]

Here again, see it yourself Mr. Support Captain (I wonder where you get these funny names from)

All times are in more than 5 minute delays.

BTW. in the future think about U.S. users too. Our times are automatically set to MM/DD/YYYY and not Day Month Year. Ah, well, what am I talking about----totally disappointed!

THE 5-MINUTE INCREMENT QUESTION

They should have said each designated time must end at a minute that's a multiple of 5: thus, 5 minutes after the hour, 10 minutes, 15, 20, 25 and so on.  If you include a time that's not a multiple of 5, such as 8:39, it will be rejected.

But here's another problem:  I uploaded batches of tweets, then checked them in my Hootsuite Pending Tweets and Pending Streams and found that several tweets had been truncated for no apparent reason.  I had to manually correct them, thus destroying some of the time-saving features of the new upload process.

SUGGESTION TO HOOTSUITE:  provide an online form for updates that allows the user to choose options within a controlled form.  In column one, row one, the user could first choose the initial post date & time from a drop down list, then either set intervals for all subsequent posts in the table (such as every 12 hours) or an option to individually select a date & time for each subsequent entry, from a drop down list.  Then for column 2, user can type in each entry in a field that limits the character count to 140 minus the ow.ly shortened link standard character count.  Then for column 3, a field with unlimited character count for entering the native url for each post to link to.  When the user then clicks "submit," he will see the table with all URLS shortened.  He can check then that all posts are complete and check all ow.ly shortened links if he desires.  When all is to his satisfaction, he can click "accept and submit."

Jake,   I have had great success uploading with notepad.  The following is the code I used today.

Format: "DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM", "MESSAGE",  "URL"

Jake, you are not making yourself clear in what you are talking about!  You can't get any easier with notepad.