I have lots of metadata in MS Excel, and it would be easy enough to rename and order those categories so that they fit those of IMDI (with some extensions that I have in favorite form). Retyping all this stuff (or copying every single field) will take quite a while, so an automatic import would be highly desirable. How can this be done?
Or, to be more specific: There is an importing function which I found, but my table from excel, instead of being turned into a table with metadata about several informants within some session node, gets transformed into session nodes instead, and even there the information from one row is compressed into on square. I don’t see a way how I can specify anything about how the importing process should take place.
The CSV import is at the moment rather rudimentary and it is only possible to import one session at a time and only the root level, i.e. all the fields that are visible in the preview pane when a session is selected, and not anything embedded deeper down. I agree that it would be nice to be able to simply paste whole rows from Excel into Arbil, but we have never gotten around to implementing this feature.
As the future of Arbil is currently not completely clear, I also cannot make any promises about this feature being added at some point. I’m sorry, that I don’t have better news.