MobileSheets Forums

Hi all,

First off, I'm completely new to the usage of tablets for performing music. Always used to print everything etc. Nevertheless, I'm quite savvy with computers, so I hope that some basic guidance will point me in the right direction.

In short, I've got a bunch of pdf files on my pc. Some are tabs I've made over the years, others are single song pdf's, again others are scanned fake/real books.

As a novice user to mobilesheetspro, I've used adobe scrobat to create bookmarks for specific songs in multi-song pdf's. I used the companion app afterwards to add collection/artist/composer data.

Thing is, if my tablet brakes down, or if I somehow screw up, I don't wanna do all that hard work again. So if I could somehow embed all this info into the pdf/csv files that'd save me a lot of redundant work later on. Provided others possess the same pdfs I'd love to share those csv files too.

Now, I see lots of posts about csv files here, but i haven't been able to find any proper guidance on how to create csv files yet. I've gone over some of the csv files, and i guess i could just use that knowledge to write my own ones in excel. But i have two remaining questions
1. Is there any particular way/software that helps creating csv files suitable for mobilesheets?
2. How does a csv file relate to pdf files? Should they simply carry the same filename, or do csv's somehow point to particular pdf's, or should i embed the csv file into the pdf?

Alternatively, if anyone knows about a full fledged csv cretion guide I'd love to hear about it!

Thank you!

Funny how stuff always seems to sort itself out once you've put it down into words..
Put differently, it was indeed almost as simple as imitating the csv files floating around here. Combined with the pdf manual's list of possible values I simply created a spreadsheet where the first row's cells represented the relevant values. Every next row then represents a particular song, and that row's cells represent that particular songs values. Seperator for two values within a cell is the upright (back)slash "|"
At first I kept getting a 'csv file needs a title value' error (or something like that), which apparently had something to do with utf-8 encoding (don't use it, simply save the spreadsheet as a bare-bones csv file).

Works perfectly, really happy with this

Just to save you the problem of explaining the "|" character every time you mention it, it is generally termed as a 'pipe'.

You can create csv files out of MSP with "Generate Song List".
To do that go to Settings - Library Settings - Generate Song List Format and select the fields that you want to be contained.
Remove the blanks between the keywords and add semicolon as separators. You just can type and edit within the format field. And you can copy paste format lines to a text file to keep different formats for later use.

@Mike: it would be great if you could add semicolon to the predefined separators.


Personally I prefer LibreOffice over Excel to handle CSV files.
When I post CSV files in the forum I usually post also the xls files that I used to create them. You might want to take a look into some of those XLS files. They contain some examples for e.g. calculating the "Pages" column from the bare list of start pages and so on.