Songs of Fellowship 4

[davepartridge]

I was wondering if anyone had tried using the Macro with Songs of Fellowship 4. I haven't had a chance yet as I don't have Access to be able to complete one of the steps.

I've got the SoF4 CD-Rom.

[brainier]

I've started to have a go and its not easy!

First the sof4words.rtf document needs some serious cleaning up before it works. Here is what I have done so far (note that all I have done is generate all the individual text files - I have not imported these into Python/Access yet.

Open .rtf file in Word (my tests were done in Word 2003)

Page Width = 40cm
Page Height = 40cm


Find What: ^#^#^#^# (Font: Bold)
Replace With: ^m^&

Replace All

--This places each song on a new page with a hard page break infront of each song.

Remove Formatting in Find What
Find What: ^p^p^p
Replace With: ^p

Repeat until nothing left to replace

--This removes lots (not all) of the blank space at the end of songs

Find What: ^p^p
Replace With: ^p

Repeat until only one thing left to replace at the very end of the document.

--This removes the final bits of blank space

Find What: ^m^m
Replace With: ^m

--This removes the double blank pages (again repeat until number of replacements is 0)

Find What: ^m^p
Replace With: (that is, replace this with no text at all)

--This removes a spurious page error starting at song 2002


Ensure page is viewed in Print Layout view
and view hidden characters
and delete the first page break in document. The very first line of the document MUST be "1691 Paul Oakley"
and view margins and ensure that the page margins are close to the full size of the 40cm/40cm page.
and create file on desktop called SOF4 and save sof4words.rtf to this folder.

Follow SOF Macro instructions from this point onwards.

[brainier]

So the Python installation went okay. Installed the latest version and double-clicked convert.py to create a textfile database.

Opened that in Access and created an Access database of the new songs.

Downloaded ZionWorx v2.0 and opened the installer in WinZip and copied out the songs database (songs.dbf).

Back to the instructions, importing the database file (rather than File > Open)

Now to get DBConv working.

More later

[davepartridge]

Cheers Brian, sounds like you've been working quite hard!

It all looks rather more complicated than it should be, but they do seem to have formatted the file in a strange way. Perhaps in future they should provide it in some sort of database file for us to use!

It's all very well providing a SongPro file but an awful lot of us can't afford the license fee!

[brainier]

And SongPro is dreadful!

But I have finished:

When I exported my DBaseIII SOF4 database I called it SOF4.dbf and that was the second last problem I had. To convert to v2.5 format using DBConv.exe (part of ZW2.5) and the index file (.dbt file) must be called SONGS.DBF and SONGS.DBT. If the files are not called this then the program does not work and reports no error messages!

So after that, DBConv created a Data folder and I used the Database > Import menu within the application to merge the SOF4 database into my church's songs database.

As some songs have the same name they conflict, and so here is a list of conflicts I found (from SoF1, SoF2 and SoF3). The versions of the songs in books 1 to 3 would need renaming first, and for those the conflict in book four would need importing and renaming to allow the import to work again. In all you need to rename the following, and import three times to merge a Sof1-3 database with SoF4.

Conflicting Songs

1693 All Around Your Throne (conflict with 1154)
1698 ALL OF ME (conflict with 1160)
1725 BENEATH THE CROSS OF JESUS (Conflict with 39)
1792 GOD OF GRACE (Conflict with 138)
1793 GOD OF HEAVEN (Conflict with 734)
1802 GOD, YOU ARE MY GOD (Conflict with 1801)
1803 GOD, YOU ARE MY GOD (Conflict with 1801 and 1802)
1809 GREAT GOD (Conflict with 1808)
1812 GREAT IS YOUR FAITHFULNESS (Conflict with 1811)
1818 HEALING GRACE (Conflict with 157)
1839 HOLY CHILD (Conflict with 769)
1842 HOLY GOD (Conflict with 1841)
1908 I WANT TO KNOW (Conflict with 842)
1978 NOW THANK WE ALL OUR GOD (Conflict with 405)
2031 SON OF GOD (Conflict with 507)
2037 TAKE MY LIFE AND LET IT BE (Conflict with 519)
2077 THIS IS THE DAY (Conflict with 553)
2150 WITH ALL MY HEART (Conflict with 610)
2152 WONDERFUL LORD (Conflict with 2151)
2194 YOURS IS THE KINGDOM (Conflict with 1679)
2196 YOUR VOICE IS LIKE THUNDER (Conflict with 1148)

[brainier]

And finally - now I need to work out why I have a symbol () in a lot of the songs rather than a line break.

So if you are copying these instructions DO NOT MERGE WITH YOUR LIVE DATABASE. Make a backup and test the process (all the above has been done on a spare computer).

[davepartridge]

Brian, you are an absolute legend. I hopefully shouldn't have a problem with conflicting songs because those in my SoF1-3 have an alternative title which includes the number in brackets.

I've done half of the process and will continue later on today and tomorrow.

Thanks so much for your help.

[brainier]

And of course the symbol is not visble in this webpage. It is the male gender symbol if you are scanning your songs for errors.

[brainier]

See http://www.zionworx.org.uk/forum_3/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=717&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a for a better way of doing this.