[Andante]

After purchasing Mobile Sheets a few days ago for Windows 11 I have not been able to import records to my satisfaction. I have "populated" the data fields using semi-colons but the finished result was a mess. I started small with a dozen records trying different layouts. The MS database is empty now as I deleted everything.

There are over 47,000 members registered on this Forum so I'm hoping for some straightforward guidance to get me started. Mike has been very helpful but I need an idiots guide. I read the manual cover to cover and checked this forum.  I'm sorry computer guys but I shouldn't need to be using for example, %name% etc, to organise my data or reading about "strings"  - the  coding itself should deal with this. My needs are simple at present - to enter sheeet music, lead sheets and chord sheets mainly for popular music. The format I want is not difficult:  2 or more lines of text with the option to add futher data if needed at a later stage.

After checking on another forum several weeks ago, the recommended approach was to create an Excel file and then save it in comma separated format. As I'm very familiar with Excel I made a start on my collection of sheet music books like: "The 50 Top Singles of All Time" I call these "collections".  I have about 30 or so of these books representing several hundred songs. In addition I have several single artist sheet music books like Adele , 30 that I call "albums". Not all of my books have been digitally scanned as yet.

A finished record in the A-Z song list should look like this:

Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)
Phil Collins    pages 12-14    Ab    BPM 116      The 50 Top Singles of All Time 

(No commas, clear spacing and an option to add a time signature at a later date if necessary.   I am aware that I can create a field(s) and hide it.

I got something like this at a third attempt but badly spaced, commas and the worse thing was calling up the title just brought me to the image of the music book cover for each of the 12 records so the pages data didn't work.

Has anybody got 

1. An Excel example showing column headings with a few records or so
   
2. An Excel CSV file that was generated from this showing whatever punctuation has been added
   
3. An image of what the finished result looks like in Mobile Sheets
   

Thank you in advance.

[itsme]

You can just look into some of the examples that are available in the forum. Just search for "csvfile" (without the quotes). Maybe a CSV for one of your PDFs is already available. Each CSV file has to match the according PDF, but alas they cannot be shared together because the PDFs are usually copyrighted. 

Here are some CSVs that match PDFs that are freely available on the web:
Creole Jazzband Fakebook 2024
https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...12013.html
Public Domain Song Anthology
https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...-8573.html
King Street Sessions Tunebook
https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...-5205.html

Or you can share the CSV that you created and that failed to work. Even without the according PDF it might be possible to give some advice.

[Zubersoft]

I still think the best option for you is to create a .csv file where every value is separated by semi-colons, not commas. The excel file you were using generate lots of empty columns, which is not optimal, so I would either recommend cleaning that up in excel or just modifying the file with a simple text editor instead of using excel, as there really isn't much excel is buying for you in that scenario other than separating the columns in a more visually pleasing way. 

Please note that Mobilesheets does not use a fixed-width font on the library screen, so spaces, tabs, etc, are not going to give consistent spacing. I might recommend using other dividers to distinguish the fields.

Mike

[itsme]

Is a sample Excel file from Andante already available? I can't see an attachment.

I prefer LibreOffice Calc for editing CSV files. Its settings dialogs are imho much better structured and understandable than the 'assistant' approach of Microsoft Excel. (btw. I replaced MS Office completely with LibreOffice).
Visualization of columns is not just pleasing but also very helpful for cleaning up unnecessary empty columns or entries that are erroneously moved by additional separators. Calculating page offsets with formulas and switching between sort by page and sort alfabetically are features that I use frequently.

[Andante]

Is a sample Excel file from Andante already available? I can't see an attachment.

I prefer LibreOffice Calc for editing CSV files. Its settings dialogs are imho much better structured and understandable than the 'assistant' approach of Microsoft Excel. (btw. I replaced MS Office completely with LibreOffice).
Visualization of columns is not just pleasing but also very helpful for cleaning up unnecessary empty columns or entries that are erroneously moved by additional separators. Calculating page offsets with formulas and switching between sort by page and sort alfabetically are features that I use frequently.

I bought Mobile Sheets on 28th March from the Microsoft Store after considering it for several weeks alongside SongBook Pro.  Getting into issues on day 1 
I emailed Support.  Mike responded very quickly with an example file but obviously no PDF to go with it. That showed me the expected layout for CSV but not the outcome. I attached examples of what I was doing. I didn't put the commas in Mike  - Excel did. 

Before the purchase I had had several compendiums of sheet music scanned. The task of digitisation is not complete.  I have now had passable but less than ideal results in Mobile Sheets.  Still looks a mess because CSV files are not expected to have white space. It also seems to me that a single line of Title text and a second line of text is the norm which if I'm honest suggests I may have made the wrong choice.

You kindly sent me some public domain sheet music and a CSV file. I imported the lot and the data shown in the Song list is title and collection only.  The rest I assume is metadata that can only be found through a filter search. I did a random pick of 20 titles. Every one was a single sheet of sheet music. I summised this from looking at the CSV file. This is as expected but I was hoping to test the more than one page display. It does not seem to work for me on my data. Page turner seems to work for single songs that have several pages but not a compendium of songs. Honestly, I do take your point about Libre Office but at 77 I don't want to start another learning curve. At my age money is far less important than time.  So many people whose advice I repect, suggested I go for MS.

More than happy to send you some Excel files, the CSV results and what that looks like on MS.

PS My initial work before I changed career was as a library and information scientist. As part of a team I worked on specifications, tender and contract documents for library managament systems. The chosen system had to handle millions of transactions a year from hundreds of thousands of customers covering all sorts of media including museum artifacts, art works and financial data too from over 60 locations including mobiles and inter-loans from other regions.  In short. I'm not a complete novice when it comes to databases although we were working to international standards for classification and cataloguing.

[Zubersoft]

The "Pages" column determines how many pages will be used for a given song/piece. So you need to specify a range if you want the song to use multiple pages (i.e. 4-6). I'm still happy to provide whatever support is going to help you get the result you want. We can continue over email, or you can attach it to a post here.

Mike

[Andante]

The "Pages" column determines how many pages will be used for a given song/piece. So you need to specify a range if you want the song to use multiple pages (i.e. 4-6). I'm still happy to provide whatever support is going to help you get the result you want. We can continue over email, or you can attach it to a post here.

Mike

Thanks Mike for your thoughtful offer, I'm more that happy to continue on the Forum so that everyone who is interested can benefit from my ignorance and learning curve. I'll attach stuff here so that others can see and offer advice and constructive criticism. And I'm happy to attach any "elegant" CSV files I produce that work.

In all the Excel files I have specified page numbers (i.e. 4-6) in the same format you suggest, it's quite critical in how I want to use your software. I still don't understand you mentioning the excess columns in Excel.  I cut and pasted just the cells with column headings that contained data into a new sheet. I will continue to experiment. It's likely to be something basic I am missing or doing. And I will not take offence if this is pointed out. 

I suppose the result I want is a slightly fuller record for Songs. If others don't need this then fine but that could be dealt with by the option to have a full or short record displayed. I've been updating myself about the CSV format.

[samibe]

If you want more data shown in the song list, you will need to change the Title Formatting. Settings > Library Settings > Piece (or Song) Title Formatting. This allows you to control what is displayed in the title and subtitle areas for the songs.
This will only show metadata that has been added to songs in mobilesheets. And it will show all entries for a field.

To add metadata there are several options:
1. The most basic is to import a song, manually fill out some of the data in the import dialog, then finish adding metadata by editing the song. You will have to do this sometimes.
2. Use PDF bookmarks (if the PDF file has bookmarks) during import to generate songs and add some metadata for them.
3. Create a csv file. Use a spreadsheet program to fill out the metadata. The first row must have labels that mobilesheets can detect. After entering the data, the spreadsheet needs to be exported as a csv file with commas or semicolons between columns of data. I ended up making a Google sheet to make it easier for me to make a properly formatted and organized csv file. A copy can be downloaded here. https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...-8745.html
Once the csv file has been used to generate songs with metadata, the csv file is irrelevant to mobilesheets. Any changes to the csv file will not show up in mobilesheets unless the songs are deleted and reimported. The import dialog box does show the mapping for the csv file columns to the mobilesheets fields so you can check it.
4. If you have your individual song pdf files in an organized directory structure, you can use the 'Populate Metadata from Directories' option in the batch import.

Once the songs (and data) are imported to mobilesheets, the only ways the change the data are via the song editor or by deleting and reimporting.

[Andante]

If you want more data shown in the song list, you will need to change the Title Formatting. Settings > Library Settings > Piece (or Song) Title Formatting. This allows you to control what is displayed in the title and subtitle areas for the songs.
This will only show metadata that has been added to songs in mobilesheets. And it will show all entries for a field.
To add metadata there are several options:
1. The most basic is to import a song, manually fill out some of the data in the import dialog, then finish adding metadata by editing the song. You will have to do this sometimes.
2. Use PDF bookmarks (if the PDF file has bookmarks) during import to generate songs and add some metadata for them.
3. Create a csv file. Use a spreadsheet program to fill out the metadata. The first row must have labels that mobilesheets can detect. After entering the data, the spreadsheet needs to be exported as a csv file with commas or semicolons between columns of data. I ended up making a Google sheet to make it easier for me to make a properly formatted and organized csv file. A copy can be downloaded here. https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...-8745.html
Once the csv file has been used to generate songs with metadata, the csv file is irrelevant to mobilesheets. Any changes to the csv file will not show up in mobilesheets unless the songs are deleted and reimported. The import dialog box does show the mapping for the csv file columns to the mobilesheets fields so you can check it.
4. If you have your individual song pdf files in an organized directory structure, you can use the 'Populate Metadata from Directories' option in the batch import.
Once the songs (and data) are imported to mobilesheets, the only ways the change the data are via the song editor or by deleting and reimporting.

Thank you for your detailed, logical response and the words of warning " Any changes to the csv file will not show up in mobilesheets unless the songs are deleted and reimported . Once the songs (and data) are imported to mobilesheets, the only ways the change the data are via the song editor or by deleting and reimporting."

Your
(1) Is how I started just to get a feel for the program with single PDFs for one piece of music.
(2)None of my PDFs have bookmarks as I assumed giving an accurate range of pages in the format (number hyphen number) would suffice 
(3) I did that with column headings.
(4) All my PDFs are in one directory so I will now separate the individual song PDFs from the bunch and create a separate directory for Batch Edit - nice tip.

I'm beginning to think that Excel does not make a good job of CSV files as itsme recommended Libre calc and you recommend Google Sheets.

Start again will be myapproach and try to get the 'template' right. Then focus on the Title Settings as you indicate.

Once again I really appreciate your help and everyone who has responded. Much obliged.

[Andante]

Bizarre. I replied to Sam but it shows up in his post.

[Zubersoft]

I fixed it for you - you need to put the text below the quoted section (which has a border around it).

Mike

[Andante]

I fixed it for you - you need to put the text below the quoted section (which has a border around it).

Mike

Thanks for your vigilance. Not all Bulletin Boards/Forums are the same it seems. Getting there slowly. I'll stick with MS, as the "after sales service", care and attention is exemplary.

[Zubersoft]

I make customer service my highest priority, even at the expense of faster updates.

Mike

[samibe]

I like Excel and use it extensively for work but I don't have it on my home computer. Also Google sheets makes it so I can enter data from my phone or other devices. I also like how the data validation lists work in Google sheets a bit better than Excel.

You don't have to use option 4. I don't personally use that method (because I'm not that organized). I have a few directories that help me keep track of which files I've added to mobilesheets and which files I'm still evaluating, editing, or building a csv file for.

When I import a bunch of PDFs, I will usually assign them to a collection named '_New'. Then whenever I have some down time I'll open that collection and start adding metadata to each of the songs in it. Once I have all the data entered for a song, I'll delete the '_New' entry from the collections field for the song, the click 'Save and Edit Next'.