Creating Spreadsheet of Current songs

[SteveK]

I have just setup our church using Zionworx, and it is great ... especially the price (my favourite!)

We have a large colection of songs now, some manually entered, others by data import, but I am now wanting to export a list of the songs we have (and ideally their alternate titles and authors) to an Excel spreadsheet to pass round the worship leaders/other users. The idea being, they can indicate which extra songs they would like included in the DB. We can then get the DB up to a 'current state' and hopefully we will have all the songs we need. We can then update on a monthly basis.

Print will do this, but I would like an electronic format. I can print to pdf, but this is not searchable. Any thoughts.

It can't be hard to interogate the DB directly, but I am not familiar with TurboDB, so without extensive googling, I'd rather not go there. And anyway, I don't want to go behind the backs of the development team who have put a lot of effort into creating ZW. Great work guys.

Cheers, Steve

[davepartridge]

Steve,

Creating a list of song titles with their alternative titles is easy, although the option I have in mind doesn't provide authors. If you go to File, Print in ZionWorx, then select 'Available song titles'. Press setup and choose your PDF writer, then save it somewhere. This will produce a list of titles and also alternative titles, although they will appear as two separate items within the list. When you open the file in Adobe Reader you can press Control F and type what you want to search for, and it should fine it.

TurboDB is not too complicated to learn, but I don't know it very well so am not sure how you would export it from within here.

[Daveee]

I have produced a songlist into a spreadsheet i did it this way
Print from zionworks the songlist
Scan list into a text file
Import into excel

I did it for a list of 1012 songs a lot of pages a lot of songs but it worked for me

[kck]

I haven't played with the TurboDB tools for several months but for someone used to messing with these kind of things I don't think it should be difficult to export the song data in a format that can be pulled into Excel without upsetting the program.

Steve

[SteveK]

Thanks for your replies guys.

I have found the print option, but it is not in a particularly useful format when printed to pdf (maybe my pdf printer!) Also I don't really want to go down the scanning route ... anyway, neither option gets the author, and with sometimes 3 or 4 songs with the same title, it causes confusion. The other week we had a song up that had the same title, and similar words, but no resemblence to the song the band was playing!

kck, what TurboDB tools have you used before, and where is a good place to get them? I did a quick Google, but found no really obvious useful site. Looks like you can do it through .net? I could go down this road, but sussing out the syntax always takes time, which I'm not particularly flush with at the momnet! Once I have a tool, the connection string, and a reference for the other syntax, I think I should be able to workout the rest.

Thanks

Steve

[kck]

I don't think you need connection strings or anything. I don't know .NET and didn't use any other language.
There are some command line tools you can download from the turboDB website - try http://www.dataweb.de/en/support/downloads.html
I think you need the data extractor. (I can't find my information but I know I managed to work out what to do from the help info that the script gives. I think you can specify delimiters and quote characters).

Another option is to put all the songs in a songlist and save it. It's XML so .NET should be able to turn it into a spreadsheet using XSLT. Double-clicking 1000 times will leave you with RSI though.

Sorry I'm not being more helpful. I'm braindead from struggling with duplicate titles myself.

Steve P

[Jonathan Hills]

Here are some steps you can go through in turbodb (I have version 5.0.6)

Open the viewer which gives you 2 tabs: tables and sql
On the table part where it says <click here to connect to a TurboDB database> browse to the default folder which is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ZionWorx\2.6\Data. Open any of the tables that appear in the browse box

Go to the sql tab, type either:
select title1, title2, writer, copyright from maintable

or

select title1, title2, writer, lyrics, copyright from maintable

depending on whether you want lyrics or not

Click on the green triangle (or hit F9).
The results are displayed
Click on Data Set at the top
Export records
At the bottom choose a file name (or browse using the ...box)
File type can be text, dbase or xml (any of which can be used in a spreadsheet or database - if using open office, dbase is best if you want the lyrics)
A 10 record preview is shown
Continue
Transfer
"The batch move completed successfully.
nnn records have been transfered." You should get this message.

[SteveK]

Thanks guys.
That looks like a good starting point - Steve, your suggested website looks useful. I would rather avoid the 1000 plus double clicks to go via a playlist - I had to do about 8000 clicks at work this week to apply a workaround caused by a bug in my companies software - Ouch!

I will take a look in the next week or so when I get a spare half hour (pretty rare at the moment) and let you know how it goes.

Steve

[SteveK]

That was even easier than I imagined. Once I had managed to get a copy of TurboDB viewer (I used the TurboDB Win32 for .NET 5.14 for .NET Framework 2.0 from the link provided by kck), it was simple, especially with Jonathan's note above (Thanks Jonathan). The viewer is free to use for reading data, you only have to pay for it if you want to build or modify a DB. 10 minutes including the download and install, and no RSI!

Interestingly, depending upon the content of your songs, the XML output may be invalid XML (and thus not possible to import to Excel) if you have certain characters in your songs. I had some '/' (or was it the '.') in the copyright of some songs which I think broke it! DBF or txt files were fine though.

Now to go and sort through our song list!

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Richard S-T]

If all you need is a list of the titles in an easily-edited format, then you can print-to-file using the Windows 'Generic/ Text Only' printer.

To install the printer:
1) Start->Printers=>Add New Printer
2) the local port is FILE:, type is Generic / Text only
3) for convenience, create a folder "C:\Print"

Then in ZW
4) File->Print... Select 'Available song titles'
5) Click 'Setup...' and select your new 'Generic / Text Only' printer, then OK
6) 'OK' ZW's print dialog
7) Enter 'c:\print\titles.txt' in the 'Output Filename' box and OK

All done! Open titles.txt the editor of your choice.

This achieves the same effect as daveee's solution without having to print and scan. However, I suspect that it won't cope with unicode very well, if at all.

Richard S-T