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First, review your proposed taxonomy. Note that each tag must have a unique name (across all levels of the hierarchy). So, for example, we could not have “New York” as both a second-level (state) tag and third-level (city) tag - we have to rename one of them (e.g. “New York City” in this case)
Navigate to Studio Home > Taxonomies. You should see Download Template in the top right. Click on that button, then select “CSV template”.
A file will download automatically. Open it using any spreadsheet application (Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, etc.).
TODO: finish writing this section-----
The “id” for each tag is required, but mostly relevant when you are aligning your taxonomy with some external system that uses IDs for each tag. If you don’t have that use case, just enter the same text for the id as for the value.
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It should look like this:
Select and delete all of the entries except the first row, which contains the headings.
Create the first tag
Now, you can start to enter the tags that make up the taxonomy. The order doesn’t really matter, except that any tags which come “below” another tag should also be below/after it in the spreadsheet. For our example taxonomy, we shouldn’t put “California” before “United States”, because the “California” tag is below (is a child of) the “United States” tag.
Each row in the spreadsheet corresponds to one tag. To create the “United States” tag from our example, we’ll put “1” for the ID and “United States” for the value:
For a tag like “United States” which is a “root” tag in the taxonomy, we leave “parent_id” empty. We can also leave “comments” empty.
Choosing an ID: The “id” column is required, but its exact value is not particularly important at this stage. The main requirement is that each row (each tag) has a unique ID. (Though remember that the “values” of each row also must be unique.) For learning purposes, feel free to use numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4 as the IDs. You could also just make the “id” the same as the “value” (i.e. put “United States” as both the ID and the value), or make up a short ID like “USA”. To understand more, and learn how IDs play an important role when updating the taxonomy, please read Concept: Why does each tag need an ID when importing a taxonomy? .
Creating “child” tags
Now, to add the “California” tag, we put it in the next row. Let’s give it the ID “2” and put the value as “California”. Now, because we want this tag to be a “child” of the “United States” tag in our taxonomy, we also need to set the parent_id field. In this case the parent is “United States”, which we gave the ID 1, so we’d put 1 as the parent_id, like this:
Likewise, to create “Los Angeles” as a child tag of “California”, we need to give it an ID (say, 3), and set its parent ID to the ID we gave to “California” (in this case, 2).
So far, this would result in the following taxonomy:
United States
California
Los Angeles
Now, continue to add the rest of the tags. You can put notes in the “comments” column if you want; that column and any other columns besides “id”, “value”, and “parent_id” are ignored by the system during import.
Save the spreadsheet using the default format (e.g. .xlsx), in case you want to edit it later.
Export the spreadsheet to a CSV file.
In Excel, use File > Save As…, and set the “File format” to “CSV UTF-8 (comma-delimited) (.csv)” (preferred) or “Comma Separated Values (.csv)” then enter a filename and save it.
In Google Sheets, use File > Download > Comma Separated Values (.csv).
In Numbers, use File > Export To > CSV… and use the default options.
Navigate to Studio Home > Taxonomies and click on the Import button at the top right of the screen.
When prompted, click to select the CSV file from step 4 and upload it.
When prompted, enter a name for the new taxonomy:
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When prompted, enter a description for the taxonomy (recommended but optional).
Then keep the page open until you get this message:
Find your taxonomy in the list of taxonomies, and click on it to verify the results:
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(note: at each level, the tags are always sorted in alphabetical order, so the order may have changed from what was in your spreadsheet.)