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jjones 
Posts:5332
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| 08/07/2006 9:24 AM |
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Using Birder's Diary's Checklist Editor is one very good way to create and maintain checklist data. For example, to update information from a book you would use the Checklist Editor. However, you may have found data for a country, for example, already in electronic format. No need to do a lot of typing in the Checklist Editor when you can easily massage the data and create an import file that Diary can read. Diary's import file format is a common inter-changeable format known as Comma-separated Values ( CSV). This means that each row/record in the file contains data for one record to be imported into the database. And each field in each row is separated by a comma. This file structure for sharing data is supported by most all programs that you will encounter. For example, Microsoft Excel supports importing and exporting files of this format. Text field data should be enclosed in double-quotes (") if the text contains a comma (,). The specific format of a Checklist import/export file for a Diary record is:
- Location Name
- Thing Name
- Common? [Note: this field should only contain a single "F" if this thing is not common at this location - otherwise, any other value indicates that it is common at this location.]
An example Diary checklist import file contents:
Code:
Colorado,Evening Grosbeak,T
Florida,Evening Grosbeak,F
Kentucky,Evening Grosbeak,F
: : : :
NOTE: The first line of this file must be a blank line! Or the import will fail. Do NOT actually type " " as is shown above.
Example process for creating a checklist import file from an outside data source
- Let's say you find a list of birds for Ecuador online.
- Save that list to a file locally on your computer
- Then import that list into Excel using [Data | Import External Data | Import Data] (your version of Excel may vary)
- Now you have one column in Excel with a list of bird names (Diary has an extensive name-matching algorithm on import that should match any names you find)
- Create a column to the left of the bird name colum.
- In the top row, type "Ecuador" into the new column.
- Select that cell you just typed Ecuador into.
- Press Ctrl+C to copy that data.
- Now select the second row down to the final row that contains a bird name and press Ctrl+V to paste Ecuador into all those rows. Now you have the first column with the name "Ecuador" in it and the second column with the list of birds in it.
- Now, let's setup the Common column. Put an "F" into the top row, third column and copy it all the way down just as you did in steps 7-9 above. If you have data indicating whether each bird is common at this location, you would now go down each row and change the "F" to "T" if the bird is common.
- Now export this data to CSV format.
- Click [File | Save As...]
- Select CSV as the file type
- Choose a name that describes your data, such as "Ecuador-birds.csv"
- Click Ok.
- Now we need to add a blank line as the first row in this file. Excel doesn't do that for us.
- Open the file you just saved above in Notepad or any other text editor.
- Create a blank row as the first row. This can usually be done by positioning the cursor at the beginning of the file and pressing Enter.
- Exit and save the changes.
Congratulations! You now have manually created a checklist file that can be imported into Birder's Diary! |
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Birder's Diary Technical Support |
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alancairns@dccnet.com
Posts:63
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| 01/25/2010 2:12 AM |
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Following the above directions I created a file so I could create a checklist for our local area, which is well demarcated.
I set up import like this: (see attached). I also had Analyse data before import checked.
And this is the error I received: (see attached)
I will also attach my input file, with which I can see no error after the PBGR. Thanks for any help you can give me on this.
Alan
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Attachment: SUCO_BD.csv
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jjones
Posts:5332
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| 01/25/2010 9:01 AM |
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Hello Alan,
Thanks for all the details, screenshots and attached files you included. Makes troubleshooting and solving your problem a snap. 
The reason for the error is that the CSV file is not in the proper format. Instead of just one record per line in the file (location, name, common), the file is just one long continuous record/line. As per the example in the top post in this thread, you want just one record per line.
However, this is the long way to getting what you want. Why not just use the Checklist Editor to add your birds to your user-defined location?
Here is the link in the Online Help to using the Checklist Editor: http://www.birdersdiary.com/Documentation/BDV37/Windows/Checklist_Editor_Window.htm
And here is a link to another post in these forums that I have recently answered where another user is attempting to do the same thing: http://www.birdersdiary.com/Support/ProductForums/tabid/75/forumid/9/tpage/1/view/topic/postid/8588/Default.aspx#8655
Essentially, use the Checklist Editor to associate this list of birds with your location.
Let me know if you have any questions along these lines.
Jeff |
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alancairns@dccnet.com
Posts:63
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| 01/25/2010 7:58 PM |
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I will go ahead and do it in the checklist editor. I had hoped to do it by import because I already have files with data for various areas. I am surprised to hear my file is one long string, though. I am wondering if it got corrupted in being sent to you. When I look at it in TextEdit it looks like this:
And in Excel it looks like this.
To me, these look just like the examples in your post.
Anyway, thanks for listening. It's not a major problem.
Alan |
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jjones
Posts:5332
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| 01/26/2010 9:59 AM |
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Hi Alan,
Very interesting. As long as you ensure your CSV import/input file is broken into lines as it should be, you will be fine. But the error from BD that you posted indicates it is indeed one long string. Are you on a MAC? BD expects the records in your input CSV file to be separated by characters. Perhaps you are saving your file in a different format and BD is not recognizing the line breakis. I bet if you tinker with it, it will work.
Jeff |
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cowboyinbrla
Posts:285
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| 01/26/2010 1:43 PM |
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Jeff/Alan:
It does look (from the screen shot sent) like Alan's using a Mac for some of his editing. That's almost certainly the source of the problem with the "one long line" issue.
In "days of old" there was no standard across the board for marking the end of a line of text in a file (referred to as a "newline"). Some systems - primarily those in the DEC line, CP/M, DOS, etc. - used both a carriage return (CR - Ascii 13) AND a line fee (LF - Ascii 10) to mark the end a line.
Other systems, including most of those derived from Unix (including Mac OS/X, Amiga, Linux, etc.) just used the LF character. And others (including the original Apple OS, as well as Macintosh OSes prior to OS/X) used just the CR character.
So if a Macintosh creates a text file natively, it will only have LF's separating the lines and Windows won't see individual lines - just one long one. However, most modern Macintosh programs which save text files can do so in a Windows-compatible format - so I suspect it would be simple to save a copy of the file that BD will be able to read.
Kevin
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alancairns@dccnet.com
Posts:63
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| 01/27/2010 8:55 PM |
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Kevin
You're absolutely right. I opened the file in notepad and it was a long string. I opened it in Windows Excel, and it opened correctly. I saved it, reopened in Notepad, and it was correctly formatted. It then imported without trouble (apart from the usual balkiness about Scoters, Yellow warblers, and Warbling Vireo).
Alan |
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SteveO
Posts:521
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| 01/28/2010 6:55 AM |
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Some systems - primarily those in the DEC line, CP/M, DOS, etc. - used both a carriage return (CR - Ascii 13) AND a line fee (LF - Ascii 10) to mark the end a line I would guess that many people do not understand the beauty of separating carriage return and line feed.
It was really a carrover from typewriters (remember them?) to dot-matrix printers (remember them?).
If you wanted to bold some text, you did a carriage return and reprinted the text - maybe a couple times - so you deposited miore ink from the ribbon on the same line for those words.
and for printing columnar data, there was nothing like a line feed (which did not reset the print head to column 1) and a backspace.
But then again - it has been a few years since I had to control the printing programmatically rather than letting software do it for me.
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Regards,
Steve |
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jjones
Posts:5332
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