From the users perspective, these functions should be replaced by .madd and direct assignment.
Thus we can rename the functions import_components_from_dataframe and import_series_from_dataframe to _import_components_from_dataframe and _import_series_from_dataframe (with an underscore in front), in order to make clear that these are back-end functions.

For example, if you have a dataframe df which you would use for import_components_from_dataframe, use the following syntax:

n.madd(c, df.index, **df)

this is shorter and cleaner.

For import_series_from_dataframe one has to check whether the index are aligned when

n.pnl(c)[attr] = df

also non-string type columns of df should be converted to strings.