Import data to projects

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Overview

Text, audio, video, and documents can be imported into projects for you to analyze, and transform common themes into docs. These include:

• Raw notes taken during a customer interview.
• Video or audio from interviews, usability test, sales call, or product demo.
• Survey responses imported via a spreadsheet.

By housing data in projects, you can capture key moments by highlighting and tagging this content. For example, any video or audio file imported into a project can be transcribed by an advanced AI-powered speech engine. From there, you can create highlights that turn your raw recordings into tagged, searchable audio and video clips.

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What data can be imported into a project?

Managers and Contributors can import data into a project using the file picker, or using one of our integrations including Google Drive, Zoom, or OneDrive. We currently support the following file types for projects:

• Video and audio files: Zoom cloud recordings, Google Meet recordings, Teams cloud recordings
• Documents: PDFs (.pdf), Microsoft Word documents (.docx), Microsoft Powerpoint files (.pptx), Keynote presentations (.key), Apple Pages (.pages), Google cloud documents (sheet, slide or drawing), OneDrive documents (PDF, Word documents, Excel sheets and Powerpoint)

When importing any file type, you can select one or many files at a time. When importing files in bulk, these will be housed as individual data points in the same project.

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Import video or audio files

The most common type of data imported into project are video and audio files. If you just want a transcript of one recording, Transcribe a video walks through it end to end. You can import video or audio files into a project in one of three ways – directly from your computer, selecting your files via an available integration, or by setting up a calendar sync to import recordings automatically from events.

• To import your data, select Import or + in the top right of the screen in your project.
• From there, select your files from Google Drive, Zoom, OneDrive, or your computer.

To automatically import video recordings using our calendar integrations, you can set up a calendar sync with Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar. We currently support importing Zoom or Teams cloud recordings with the below combinations:

• Zoom with Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
• Teams with Outlook Calendar

Once set up, recordings will be automatically added to your project once the live event has completed.

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Import presentations and documents

Any document brought into Projects is powered by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help transform them into machine-readable content that can be instantly summarized and surfaced in search alongside workspace data. We currently support PDFs (.pdf), Microsoft Word documents (.docx), Microsoft Powerpoint files (.pptx), Keynote presentations (.key), Apple Pages (.pages), Google cloud documents (sheet, slide or drawing), OneDrive documents (PDF, Word documents, Excel sheets and Powerpoint).

• To import your document, select Import or + in the top right of your project.
• Once imported, your document will live as a standalone object in your project. From there, you can change the preview within your note to display: Full document, Single page or Card.

Note: preview won’t be available for other filetypes, e.g. zip files

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Import survey data from a spreadsheet

You can import survey response data from a CSV spreadsheet for deeper analysis alongside your customer calls. In a project, you can view each participant’s completed survey structured on a single page, with a breakdown of each question and answer they have submitted. The file should be UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) file with a header row and have at least column each for:

• Title – text format (200 character limit). This is typically the name or unique identifier of the survey participant.
• Content – required, text format (300,000 character limit). Columns mapped to Content become the body of data object that will be analyzed. For surveys, question columns will be automatically mapped to content.

A basic example of how the CSV should be structured is: For columns that are survey questions, we will also automatically format these as Free text, Single select or Multi-select at import. To ensure multi-select answers are imported correctly, add ; between options in the CSV. For example:

• To import a CSV, select Import or + in the top right of the screen in your project and select your file.
• From there, review and confirm what columns from your spreadsheet you wish to import and preview how it will be presented on a page in your project.
• Once import is complete, each participant’s completed survey will map as a single object in your project, with each question and answer mapped into it’s own question block.

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Import historical data in bulk

Easily migrate and consolidate your customer data into projects using bulk import. This allows you to upload multiple files and folders at once, streamlining your workflow. Read our doc on how to prepare and import folders of historical data into Dovetail →

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Automatically import data using Zapier

With Zapier, you can import text-based data automatically into a project from other apps. For example, you could create notes from SurveyMonkey responses, connect an NPS tool like Delighted or AskNicely, or add people to your database via a Google Form. To view what apps you can use via Zapier, please view our Zapier directory.

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Restore a previous version of your data

Dovetail automatically keeps a version history for data in your projects, so an accidental edit, an overwritten transcript, or a deleted paragraph is recoverable.

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How versions are saved

Dovetail saves a new version whenever you stop editing for 10 seconds. The timer resets each time you make another change, so a long, uninterrupted editing session is captured as a single version at the next pause rather than as hundreds of tiny ones.

• Versions are saved automatically. There is no “save” button and nothing to turn on.
• If several people are editing the same data, the pause applies to the data as a whole. One version is saved covering that editing burst, listing everyone who contributed to it.
• Edits made by Dovetail’s AI are saved as versions too, and are attributed to the magic contributor rather than to a teammate.

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View previous versions

• Open the data in your project.
• Select the More (···) menu in the top right.
• Select Version history.

The version list appears on the right, newest first, with each version labeled by the time and date it was saved (for example, 3:45pm 18 Sep 2026) and the avatars of the people who contributed to it. The most recent version is labeled Current. Select any version in the list to preview it, read-only, on the left.

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Restore a version

• Select the version you want from the list.
• Select Restore this version.

The content of that version becomes the most recent version of your data. Restoring is not destructive to your history: it adds a new version on top rather than deleting anything, so every version you could see before the restore is still in the list, and you can restore back to where you were if you change your mind. Restore replaces the body of your data — the text, transcripts (including speaker labels), embedded video, audio, PDFs and other file nodes, redactions and video or audio edits stored in the document, survey question-and-answer blocks, mentions and in-document references, highlight reels inserted into the body, and any AI-written text that was already in it. It does not change anything around the body: the data’s title, custom fields, tags, comments, summary, project or folder location, the locked or editable toggle, and version history itself all stay exactly as they are now.

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Keep the current data as well

If you want the older content without giving up the current content, select Make a copy instead. This creates a new data object in the same project named Copy of <your data's name>, containing the version you were previewing, and takes you straight to it. Your original data is left exactly as it is. The copy starts its own version history from the moment it is created; it does not inherit the history of the data it was copied from.

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Good to know

• Highlights, tags, and comments aren’t stored in a snapshot. The preview shows the text of a version without its highlights, and because restore rewrites the whole body in one go, any existing highlights collapse rather than returning to their old positions.
• Embedded files that were removed after a version was saved are put back into the data on restore, as long as the file still exists in Dovetail.
• Version history is available for data and docs in projects. Canvases are not covered.
• Up to 1,000 versions are shown for a single piece of data.
• Very large data may not be versioned. If a single data object grows beyond Dovetail’s document size limit, new versions stop being saved for it.
• Version history is deleted along with the data. If you delete the data, the project, or the workspace, its versions are removed too.

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FAQs