04-01-2025, 12:13 AM
(03-31-2025, 08:04 PM)itsme Wrote: 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.