At 12:42 AM 12/18/2010 +1300, Robin Sheat wrote:
You can use the excellent tool MarcEdit for this. Get it from http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php [snip] Another is that the post suggests using Excel (that said, you seem to be using Excel anyway.) In my experience, the biggest way of losing data is to put it
Op vrijdag 17 december 2010 17:58:35 schreef Koustubha Kale: though Excel (OpenOffice is safer, but not by a whole lot.) I had an instance where putting the data through Excel caused issues such as it treating dates wrongly, and thinking ISBNs/ISSNs were numbers (when they're not, as in a leading 0 is significant, and converting them to scientific notation is not at all helpful to anyone.) With care you can do it, but be careful.
I would respectfully disagree. We have made extensive use of OpenOffice (v3.2.1) which has good macro and regex-based find and replace functions. It allows for formatting cells by column (e.g. dates as YYYMMDD and ISBNs as text.) It allows direct export as a UTF-8 tab-delimited csv. We have also found that judicious use of column sorting can be a most effective tool for finding glitches that could confuse MarcEdit (agreed it would be nice if Terry could produce a *nix based version - I think I even heard a rumour that he's working on just that.) If there is interest on this list, I could probably come up with some "tips and tricks" to eliminate all Micro$oft formatting and best use oOo functionality.
My guideline is that if you can at all avoid using a spreadsheet, do so. They tend to do more harm than good, as they're not databases. [snip] Anyway, it's probably easier to use to get started than my script, so see how you go.
Given that a "spreadsheet" is basically a tab-delimited text file with the addition of a bells-and-whistles enhanced GUI, I'm not sure why you say that. However I would really appreciate if you could make your script available, I'd like to take an in depth look at it (every day is a learning experience.) Best, Paul --- tired old sys-admin.