Exporting your register

Every report screen has a Download CSV button, and Reports home carries one more button that downloads your whole individuals register. This topic covers all of them, and the register file in detail.

What the download is

There are seven CSV downloads: Beneficiaries by status, Beneficiaries per program, Attendance rate per activity, Programme M&E, Project summary, Beneficiary participation, and the individuals register. Generate report adds a PDF. Each CSV holds the same rows as its screen; where the screen has a filter bar the file respects it, and the register export ignores every filter.

The register download always carries the same name: individuals.csv

It exports your whole register, ordered by last name and then first name. No date range and no other filter applies to it, so the download is the entire register every time.

What is in the file

The columns arrive in a fixed order, and it is this one:

ID, Full Name, Full Name (AR), Gender, Date of Birth, Nationality, Phone, Phone Alt, Email, ID Type, ID Number, Governorate, District, Address, Status, Registration Date, Consent Given and Notes.

If your role is restricted from seeing a field, that column is dropped from the heading row and from every data row together, so the file never carries a heading with nothing underneath it. Two colleagues with different roles can therefore download files with different numbers of columns, and both files are correct.

Opening it

The file is written with a byte order mark, which is the marker a spreadsheet needs in order to read Arabic correctly. Open it in Excel and Arabic names appear as Arabic names rather than as unreadable characters.

Because it is a CSV rather than a workbook, it carries no formatting and no second sheet. It is the data on its own, ready to be sorted, filtered or loaded into another tool.

The download is recorded in your workspace activity log. The log records how many records were exported and nothing at all about their contents.

How the file is protected

Every value is neutralised against spreadsheet formula injection before it is written. A cell that begins with an equals sign, a plus sign, a minus sign, an at sign, a tab or a carriage return is given a leading apostrophe, so the spreadsheet treats it as text rather than running it.

Genuine numbers are left alone, so real data stays usable and a column of amounts still adds up the way you expect.

This matters because a value that somebody typed into a form should never be able to run as code on a colleague's machine. The protection is applied for you, every time, and there is nothing to switch on.