RandomPicker works with two types of information about the entries or participants – public information and internal notes.
- The entry (public information) can be visible in the table of winners.
- The internal note is not publicly visible
After you import the list from your excel file, it will be stored in the RandomPicker system in the same way:
The complete list of entries is available only to the account owner. The list is not public, nobody can download it, except account users and administrators.
After you conduct drawing, the public information will be visible in the table of winners in the Public record and in the full-text search:
That is why we recommend avoiding sensitive information in the public information and import them in the second column as an Internal note. The internal note is not visible to anybody except admins.
How to add entries
You can add entries in several different ways. Click at “Add new entries” button on the Project overview page and choose one of the following options.
1. Type or paste entries manually
If your list of entries is host just type them into the form. Put each entry in one row.
2. Import entries from a file
RandomPicker accepts excel files (XLSX, XLS) and TXT format. It is very important to use the exact file structure unless the entries won’t be successfully imported!
- Put each entry into a separate row.
- The first line in the import file (usually used as a header) is not imported by default.
- Blank rows or cells are not included in the draw.
- The file can have one, two or three columns only. Each column is dedicated to a specific kind of data:
- Public information in the first column. Usually, unique information which identifies the entrant – name, customer id, etc.
- Internal note in the second column. It is visible only to you as a project owner. You can use personal information in this column that will help you identify winners. This field is optional -you can keep it blank.
- Weight in the third column. If all participants have the same probability to be chosen, leave those fields blank. In other cases you need to add values to all participants, even if only a few have higher probabilities to be chosen (1=standard, 2=twice higher probability, 3=triple, etc. 0=excluded from the draw). If you apply weights, it will be indicated in the public record. The maximal weight depends on your plan (bigger weight will be reduced to your max. limit). Decimals are rounded. Read more about weights here.
- For excel files – only the first sheet will be imported.
- For excel files – please note that excel transforms long numbers (613839000002 to 6,13839E+11) – we recommend changing the cell format to text.
- Columns in the TXT file are separated by the tab.
- The upload file limit is 5MB. If your file is larger, try to remove unnecessary information and try to change the file format. XLSX can be significantly smaller in some cases due to internal compression.
There are two ways how to handle multiple entries. If a person buys for instance 10 tickets: put him 10 times to the list or put weight “10” to his entry. Both options increase his chance to win 10 times compared to people with a single ticket. The difference is that the person can win several times in the first option (if there are more prizes), the second option assigns a prize to the person only once.
If you need to convert your list with duplicate entries into a list with unique entries and their weigth, check our tutorial here: How to convert duplicates into deduplicated table with weights in Excel.
3. Generate a range of numbers automatically
RandomPicker generates a range of numbers if you choose this option. You need to input 3 values: From, To and Step (example: from 1 to 500 step 1 means create 500 entries from 1 to 500).
4. Registration form – widget and landing page
People can submit their entry on your website if you embed our form or if you send entrants to the landing page. Information collected by widget or landing page is directly stored to your RandomPicker project. You can combine both widget data and your manual import. The entries collected by the widget are marked so you can process (delete) them separately from other entries. More about widget here.
5. API connection
You can add entries via our API, too. The API implementation is suitable only for large, or long-term projects because there is some programming on your side. Please contact us if you are interested.