[Koha] data migration from excel to koha

[Paul]

At 12:42 AM 12/18/2010 +1300, Robin Sheat wrote:
>Op vrijdag 17 december 2010 17:58:35 schreef Koustubha Kale:
> > 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
>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.