Spreadsheet formatting guidelines

These features are only available to partners using YouTube's Content Manager to manage their copyrighted content.

You can create a YouTube delivery spreadsheet using any spreadsheet application that supports UTF-8 text encoding. To ensure successful delivery, you need to save the file using UTF-8 encoding. Not all spreadsheet applications save in this format by default.

Microsoft Excel for Macintosh does not support UTF-8 encoding. If your metadata includes any non-Latin characters, use a different spreadsheet application such as Google Sheets.

The first row in the spreadsheet lists the columns you're providing data values for, separated with commas. The column names need to match the names as they appear in the spreadsheet template. They can appear in any order, as long as each row uses the same order. You can omit any optional column for which you aren't providing data.

Each subsequent row in the spreadsheet provides the metadata values for one delivered item. The comma-separated values must be in the same order as the column list from the initial row. Each row should appear on a new line.

Formatting rules for metadata fields

• The value for a metadata field can include any UTF-8 characters. Angled brackets (< or >) are not allowed in video titles or descriptions.
• If a value includes embedded commas, enclose the whole value within double-quote characters. (You can enclose all values within double-quote characters if you want.)
• If a value includes embedded double-quote characters, include two double-quote characters and enclose the whole value within double-quote characters.
• To provide a list of values, separate the individual values with a vertical bar character (|).
• Leading and trailing whitespace characters are trimmed.
• All fields need to be formatted as plain text, including fields whose values are dates or exclusively numeric.