Tab-delimited export
I've added a tab-delimited export, for use in Microsoft Excel and elsewhere. Go to the Extras tab to download the file to your desktop.Tab-delimited supplants the former CSV export, which had some drawbacks. (I'll be working to get it up to snuff in the near future.) Among other things, it handles special characters better, and includes all your fields. Problems remain with non-Latin characters, such as Chinese and Georgian.
So far, testers on the Google Group have reported no problems. If you find one, go ahead and post it there, or here.
In other news, also check out the Google Group for a cool new beta feature I'm developing, and asking for comments on. It's not ready for blogging yet.
posted by Tim at 5:23 AM
16 Comments:
Thank you SO MUCH for this feature! I've been waiting for this for quite some time.
tab-delimited
What does this mean?
CSV. CVS is a drug store chain.
'tab-delimited' means you get the content of one field, then a tabulator, then the content of the next field, etc. - one line per book. So when you open the exported file in excel or a similar program you get one line per book and one column per field (author in one column, title in the next etc.).
Re: CVS: Wow. I can't slip anything past you guys. Okay, fixed.
Re: Tab-delimited. Well said. Basically, the export now works.
I've had to edit out all the tabs in my comments!
Ringman! Just email me. I can strip 'em out lickety-split. I should have thought to.
Done now.
Problem is found to open the excel file by OpenOffice version 2.02. Can you solve it? Many thanks!
Alan. I don't think I can solve the OpenOffice problem. Did you try renaming the file to .txt (as above)?
I downloaded it and every other character is null. Here are the first few bytes:
^@5^@1^@8^@4^@2^@9^@
Any idea why this would be?
(Those aren't two characters ^ and @ but the null byte represented by Ctrl-@).
Problem:
Works well except that all the dates (apart from date entered) are corrupt. They look like 670406400 for example
I suspect this may be because I use the european format?
It works nicely to open it in .txt format and copy and paste it into OpenOffice's Calc. Thx a lot!!!
What's with having a null after every single character in the file?!
Tim, this is great, thank you. But I'm seeing the same thing as milesc, and I see no answer to his question. What is the format for the contents of the date-started and date-completed fields? It doesn't look like a date to Excel.
The date issue is fixed.
Hello LibraryThing,
I am trying to use the ISBN search to speed up cataloguing a small library then export all the data for use with PMB (an open-source PHP lending system). PMB will only accept UNIMARC format. Is the data that can be exported as a CSV from LibraryThing in UNIMARC format?
Otherwise, can someone recommend a worthwhile web-based lending system that might be compatible with LibraryThing CSV exports?
Kind regards,
Ben Corser
Spike Island Associates Intern
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