Lesson 8 - Import Text CSV Data

In this video we're going to show you how you can import data into notedex.  NoteDex features a powerful text import function and this can help you to import text from different apps as NoteDex cards each row of data in your file will become one card and each card has five fields to be defined the title the front text the back text a group and a tag which can be optional if you have a lot of text cards to create you may want to create the data in say Excel and then import them into NoteDex this may save you a lot of time furthermore there are many apps that you might be using for collecting information like research or read it later apps but now you want to import that data into NoteDex so you can process and edit them we'll be showing you how to import data from a number of sources in this video Let's create a new stack and we'll get ready to import data into NoteDex so to open the text interface you just open the stack that you want to add cards to like I just did and then you click the menu at the top of the screen and you click on the grid icon which is for text import and this brings up the following screen the most important part of the screen are the two buttons at the bottom import the CSV text file and create the cards so if you have a file in the right format you just have to click the first button to find the file and open it and then click the second one to generate the cards and if you do that it will just take a second or two to import cards depending on how many you have okay so now let's go into this in a little bit more detail but first of all a caution you'll notice that we have an icon here a checkbox called generate thumbnails now as you know one of the things that makes notex unique is its visual presentation and the thumbnail image of each of your each of your comments so no decks always creates a thumbnail image whenever you edit your card now if we are going to create the thumbnails as part of the import process this can take one to two seconds per card so if you have a lot of cards that you're going to be importing that could take a long time and therefore we recommend you do not generate the thumbnails but once you're opening the cards and editing them then the card thumbnail will again be generated so just be careful there we tend to keep the generate thumbnails unchecked but you're more than welcome to keep it clicked if you want to just be prepared to wait uh some time you'll also know that on our interface we have an ad button this allows you to manually add rows of text into the card into the card grid okay so now let's look at the rated import a data file if you have a data file and it has groups and tags then they will automatically be generated if they don't exist in your stack which is neat please make sure to just have one group and one tag per card in your input import file and we'll show you a demo now of these features so what is a CSV file so a CSV file means comma separated values file and it's a very common text format and many applications can handle CSV files like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and many of many other apps in this example I'll use Microsoft out Microsoft Excel so here is an Excel file that I created earlier and a couple of things to note here first of all as I mentioned before the the CSC file must have a header row that that header row is going to actually be ignored by note decks but it will make sure that you have your data in the right columns if you don't have a header row no decks will still import your data but it will ignore the first row of your file so in our example we have the header row properly defined the the names actually can be whatever you like it's going to ignore them it's just really the fact that we've got for your convenience for for your as you're creating the file it's more just for our own visual convenience to make sure we've got the right data in the right columns and obviously if your data is not in the right columns it's not going to import it correctly so in this example we've got a sample set of Spanish data that we've just made up and we have also included a title I've just given it a number for each card then the front of the card is going to have the English the back of the card is going to have the answer in Spanish and I've also included some flags for groups and tags you'll notice here that I'm using the same group called Spanish 101 but I've given different tags and notice is going to automatically generate and allocate the groups and tags to the cards as you would expect so next stage let's actually import this data so I'm going to save this file which was in Microsoft Excel and we're going to save it as a CSV file that's the most important thing that we need to do and in Excel you just click file save as and you get a number of options and you choose CSV and then we click save and I'm just going to replace the one I had earlier okay so now it's saved I'm going to close Excel I'm going to come back to note X and I'm going to import the CSV file so click on import CSV file as you can see no decks very quickly Imports the data into the table and this allows us to check the data before we import it as cards so in this example I made a deliberate mistake just to show you as part of the demonstration and you'll notice my last line I've got good afternoon football buenos not just well actually that should be good evening so if I want to change it I can just click on the row and we can edit that Row in red deck so I'm going to say good evening foreign s is for us to click on create cards now in this example because I just got a few cards I am actually going to click generate thumbnails and it will take about 10 or 15 seconds after I click create card so let's give it a go create cards gives me a warning I'll say okay and now it started so now NoteDex is importing the card generating the thumbnails as we speak if I didn't click on generic thumbnails it would have been just one second and the data would have been created and imported but as we're generating thumbnails there we go now we're finished and now we can go back to the stack and there you see with the thumbnail images of the cards the cards have been imported if I open a card we can see that it's got the title the front text uh the tag that I mentioned flip on the back we've got the Spanish and then just to be sure go back to the groups we've got the Spanish 101. so there you have it that's importing CSV text files into NoteDex we hope you enjoyed this video we'll do some extra videos showing some more advanced methods of importing text from different applications really just means you have to manipulate some of the text a bit more but we'll have those in some future videos but for now that's it thanks very much for watching and hope you enjoy note decks