Working Offline with the Grade Center
Topic Overview
To eliminate potential double entry of Grade Center data, you can perform offline grading, and then import grades into Grade Center. You can also upload grades from external sources such as an Excel spreadsheet or a comma separated values (CSV) file.
Data uploaded from Excel to Blackboard must be formatted very specifically to upload correctly and be synchronized with existing Grade Center data.
Formatting External Files for Uploading
To synchronize external data to Grade Center data, unique identifiers are necessary for each student and for each column in the Grade Center. The unique identifier used for each student is the student's user name. The unique identifier for each column is a column ID number. Column ID numbers are generated by the system and should not be changed or deleted. Columns that do not have column ID numbers in an uploaded file will create new columns in the Grade Center.
IMPORTANT!
 Columns that are added to the Grade Center from an external file are added as text columns with points possible equaling zero (0). Text columns cannot be included in calculated columns, such as weighted, total, average, and minimum/maximum. Convert text columns to other columns types and add points possible by editing the column after the upload.