04-30-2017, 08:18 AM
I needed to import a book of songs and, although my initial thought was to split into separate pdfs, I decided to play around with the CSV import mechanism (just to see how it worked)
Although I've managed to get it to work, the documentation could be improved to make it more obvious. Some of the points below are solely to aid others using this mechanism for the first time.
I'm sure someone is going to tell me that they have such a tool (I think there is something earlier in this thread but I'm ideally looking for something pretty easy to use - not because I'm thick but because I'm not likely to use it extensively and don't want to keep relearning how to use it).
Still a great program
Cheers
Geoff
Although I've managed to get it to work, the documentation could be improved to make it more obvious. Some of the points below are solely to aid others using this mechanism for the first time.
- The PDF and CSV need to be present in the same folder when importing - you can't just import the CSV. Files need to have the same name (apart from the extension)
- You can't do import via the Companion program (shame)
- In my first try ( the PDF book already loaded on the tablet), it appeared that MSP was processing both files as I moved sequentially through the pages to check the cropping (as shown by the page/total pages indicator)
- There didn't seem to be a way to create/use a collection
Note for new users: you can specify this in the first line of the CSV file e.g. "title;pages;collections;")
- There appears to be an issue removing the songbook so that it can be replaced - deleting it from the Songs tab doesn't delete the songs that referenced it. Although one can use a filter (quite hard to find) on the Songs tab to identify songs with a common string in their name, there is no "Select All" option to mark them for deletion; it is a pain to mark each song individually.
In the end I used the Companion program to delete the songs (sort on the collection field and use standard window operations to delete multiple songs)
- Looks like if one wants to update the CSV, one will have to effectively remove the songbook and associated songs before reimporting (not fully investigated as had already spent enough time)
- When importing the CSV, I had a truncated window showing the entries available for selection (the "outline" box was chopped on the right side of the dialog even though there was plenty of room to display it). The box did show "Select None" (or similar) but I'm sure that when I first attempt there was a "Select All" on the right of the dialog box. Without a "Select All", I had to manually select each song (for a small number of songs this is ok but if it was a large book!). I tried several times to see if I could get a full dialog but failed (I suppose I should have seen what happened if I had closed/restarted MSP).
I'm sure someone is going to tell me that they have such a tool (I think there is something earlier in this thread but I'm ideally looking for something pretty easy to use - not because I'm thick but because I'm not likely to use it extensively and don't want to keep relearning how to use it).
Still a great program
Cheers
Geoff
Samsung Galaxy Tab A6