Switching Fundamental logbook formats in Safelog from EASA to FAA, FAA to EASA, etc.
Please listen to the audio above which goes into this issue in more detail.
It is important when setting up Safelog to consider and chose your logbook setup carefully to be consistent with your regulatory needs and career goals. This includes making sure that you wisely and with foresight choose the fundamental logbook format (EASA, FAA, CASA Australia, Transport Canada, etc) that you have selected. While Safelog does of course have mechanisms to let you add fields and otherwise modify your logbook as your career progresses, fundamentally changing the structure of your logbook is a very major operation that is not to be taken lightly. It is a potentially very error-prone operation that may very well require considerable manual work by you. Moreover, there is always a risk that you may lose or incorrectly alter some of your "good" data. Therefore, you need to have a really strong think before you try anything like this, and also you need to accept complete and total responsibility if you attempt this. Make plenty of backups - both offline and online - before you do anything irreversible. You have been warned!
When changing fundamental logbook formats, it's not like changing your money from dollars to euros and back and expecting to get more or less the same amount. A better analogy is like translating poetry from English to Japanese and back several times. Each time you do this, something may very well get "lost in translation." Taking the example of FAA vs EASA for example, pretty much all 'similar sounding' stuff is actually quite different legally and practically: EASA PIC/P1 is not identical to FAA PIC. Same for night time, flight time, block time, simulator time, instrument time, night time, solo, PICUS/dual, cross country, and on and on. Similar, perhaps - identical - no. Moreover, in some cases fundamentally translating from one format to another involves assumptions that may not always be correct for all pilots.
The good news is that many people reading this don't really need to change their basic logbook style. Rather, what you can do is go to safelogweb.com .. printing and reports and just use a printout in the 'target' style. Safelog uniquely among eLogbooks lets you do this. Certain assumptions will have to be made and you need to make smart use of the options and derived fields available, but this is often 'good enough' for pilots seeking a general but good-enough translation into another format. It won't be perfect for all pilots, but it will certainly in general be much much better than what any competing product can do. Please try this first.
Second, if you just have a few flights in Safelog so far, consider just starting over and re-entering. Go to SafelogWeb.com - other tools - re-run setup wizard. You may or may not want to go to other tools .. mass actions to delete all of your flights prior to doing this. Just re-entering a few pages of flights is probably preferable to dealing with the complexity of auto-conversion.
If you already have a lot of flights, you can also try going to SafelogWeb.com -- other tools - re-run setup wizard. This will let you change, but, again, you need to be prepared for all eventualities. This is "major surgery." It is error prone. It will not always be doable for all. We make no guarantees. You should always plan to have a CSV backup of your log data before trying anything like this and be prepared to do significant manual work in your favorite spreadsheet program to manually prepare your data. We're giving you the worst case scenario here, but please understand that this is (or can be) a major operation.
