I exported a list to excel from my 2007 site and then imported that excel(with import excel app) to my 2013 site. Some of the columns imported with their type different, but I could simply change them to choice, date, etc. and it worked. However, one of the columns was "person or group", which looks up a user. When I imported the list, this column was changed to single line of text. The option to change the type to person or group isn't available. Is there any way to do this?
1 Answer
I don't know of a way to change the actual column type, but in the same situation I did the following:
- Created a new column, using the people picker type
- Put the two columns side-by-side in a view, with my new people column to the right of my existing text column
- Put the list in Quick Edit mode by clicking the "Edit this list" link at the top of the view
- Copied my existing name values and pasted them into the new column
Couple of gotchas - I had to do the names a few at a time. Trying to do the whole column (300+ names) at once didn't work out so well. I also had to wait several seconds each time for the field to validate the new name values. Other than that, it worked and I just deleted the text column when I was done editing the list.