| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Ian |
Posted - 09 Jun 2005 : 18:54:40
Hi Alesio,
I'm finally getting around to attempting serious use of XMM, but having lots of problems getting it to do what I want. I ask your help to tell me what I am doing wrong.
As the time has gone by, I know you work very hard to debug the program. Personally I think that you charge too little (free updates after only $10 purchase, very hard for you to make money and support the program).
However I'd like to list some problems that I see. No doubt some are just due to my poor understanding of proper use.
version: 4.1 B1
1) LIST VIEW:
List view has MANY categories, yet does not contain one that is VERY important to me. I could care less about categories of Loaned (never do I loan), VALUE & Price(Besides the same to me, why care, I buy it, money is gone), Owner (ME .. always, otherwise why in my dbase ?), POSITION, FREE TIME, MODE (can't even guess what they are nor why I'n need them in the dbase), VIDEO STANDARD (again not important. Either I have a multi-standard DVD/TV/ etc and can watch anything, or I don't, in which case I would only have one standard.
Yet -> BOX ID -> WHERE my Movies are.. is NOT in the Grid view. Thus there is no way in grid view to find my movies. No way to sort by Box_ID obviously.
2) SORTING
On the left window "Total Movies Listed", I select at top CD BOX ID - TITLE, In Filters I select ASCENDING & sort by: CD BOX ID (which is called in "normal view, under MEDIA tab as "BOX ID".
The sort is NOT a true sort, but a "silly sort". Meaning the numbers sort like this: "1, 10, 100, 101...109, 11, 110, ...117, 118, 119, 12, 120... 129, 13.... Thus the sort is useless, since it is NOT a sort by numerical order. It's the old style "Microsoft Silly Sort".
In Grid view, of course it's the same silly sort, not true numerical sort. The SORT should be able to properly sort by numerical order, not being so simple that it thinks 49 follows 489. And 9 is AFTER about 500 movies !!
3) Don't you think it's time to either have someone fix up the Moviecards and/or remove the ones with errors that can't be fixed. I tell friends to buy the program. Then i show them the movie cards and they ask "WHY all the buggy movie cards are there ? Many of them don't work." !! Then they don't trust the program and do not buy. There is no use having features like that if many of them are always the same ERRORS and won't work.
The dbase main script by Freakbrother is always updated and VERY well supported - but not the moviecars. I find this a serious issue.
4) EXPORT
Since I'm only wanting to do an extremely simple export to XLS, resulting in a proper Excel spreadsheet - This is probably my lack of brain-power. Hopefully you can tell me how to it:
A) I go to the EMM HELP file-> Click on Exporting (same goes for Importing). NOTHING happens. No help comes. The right side pane stays on the previous help issue. Thus I can not get help there.
B) I select Database -> Export -> Excel -> Single File Export ->
Then I create C:\Program Files\eXtreme Movie Manager\Export\ and enter that as Target DIR. The Delimters ; and Report-Single.csv
Then GO
C) I open the Report-Single.csv and find fields like so:
Again in SILLY SORT, not true numerical sort. Some list many actors, some list none, some list a few. (don't know why).
139;"CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 3/6 (2000)";"";
14;"24 Season 2 - 6/6 (2001)";"Jon Cassar | Rodney Charters | Davis Guggenheim | Kevin Hooks | Stephen Hopkins | Frederick King Keller | Winrich Kolbe | Paul Shapiro | Bryan Spicer | Ian Toynton | Brad Turner | James Whitmore Jr.";
514;"Stephen King's: Needfull Things (1993)";"Fraser Clarke Heston";
140;"CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 4/6 (2000)";"";
141;"CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 5/6 (2000)";"";
If I open it with Excel, its just the exact same text each line in ONE CELL, not in seperate cells, like a real usefull Excel spreadsheet. If I open it in Notepad and try to Paste Special into Excel as Comma Seperated Values text, so that each value goes into a seperate cell, Excel will NOT show that option.
Thus it seems not to be true CSV file, as I can find no way to paste into Excel like normal CSV file.
Results by my poor technique -> A useless Excel file, completely unable to enter categories into seperate cells.
Can you please explain to me what I am doing wrong. I just want a simple Export to Excel. With each field in a seperate cell. And I want to be able to select ANY cell from the 7 tabs in Normal View. I see Custom & Extra tabs seem fully supported by export and grid. yet not all Media tab fields.
I know I must be missing something very obvious. But after 3 continuous days of trying I really need some help here.
Also -> BOX ID AGAIN is NOT available for EXPORT. Thus even when you tell me how to create a real useful Excel spreadsheet via export, I will NOT be able to find any of my DVDs by that list either.
Again-> I find many choices available on the EXPORT options, but NONE of them include BOX_ID (or CD-ID as you call it someplaces in the program).
To make it plain this is the storage system I use (along with 100's of my clients) http://www.allwebsales.be/products/koffer_510.jpg
Each plastic sleeve has 2 DVD's in it, 1 in front, 1 in back. Each sleeve is numbered. Without the number, you never find the movie.
I've taken the time to manually enter with each movie on the 3rd tab, the box id and now I find most parts of XMM do not support that field. Yet many other totally useless (for me) fields are supported well. As noted above. What is the solution please ?
Thanks very much for your help. Sorry to put so much in one place and sorry I am so frustrated that I cannot spoeak properly.
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| 6 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| ericb2038 |
Posted - 18 Sep 2005 : 14:16:54
Excel export :
One thing i do is exporting the Excel report as a text file name : "Report Single.csv.txt".
Then i open it with Excel (file->open -> choose txt types).
That pops up the import wizard that ask what the column type are which delimiter is used, and so forth. Some column types needs to be defined as text : SiteID, or movie ID for example (especially a site ID coming from IMDB, where a lot of them start with a leading '0' that excel will trim pityless if the column type is defined as number or standard). On the other hand columns such as actor, plot, etc.. would rather be defined as standard, if you want them to appear (defined as text their content evaporates, don't ask me why, ask MS :)).
Using the Excel text import wizard that way lets you fine tune your import and avoid problems and with a bit of pratice, it only takes a couple of seconds ;).
As for sorting your info :
Before export :
Display the list of films in the order you want them sorted :
Movie ID - Title for example.. ExMM exports the films in the order they are displayed, so if you display by : Movie's title, sort by Director it's the order that will be used in the export.
If you display by Movie's Title, sort by CD Box ID that might help to solve your problem of BOX-ID not exported :
provided that the box number starts at 1, all you would have to do in Excel (before any sorting) is add a column, type a 1 in it
and drag (by clicking on the little square at the bottom-right corner of the selected cell) to the bottom of the list. Excel will increment the value of each cell by 1. (if the first id is, say 1387, that will work too:))
After you've imported in Excel :
- Select All columns (CTRL A)->
- Menu Data->Sort
- Select the columns and order you want to sort by
note one thing : if a field that contains a value such as '123' is defined as text, the sorting will be done in string mode :
in string mode 10 immediately follows 1 (in a 1 to 20 serie : 1,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,19,2,20,3,4,5,6,7,8,9). and ExMM export
all numbers without leading '0's (with leading 0 the numerical order is restored in string mode : 0001,0002,0003..0010,0011..1000).
Alessio ? Leading 0's up to 6 or 7 '0' for all numerical fields at export ? can we hope ? (Six 0 : one million entries, 7 : 10 millions.. even with the growth of the hard drives nowadays, i doubt anyone would have more that 10 million entries in their DB ;)
that would be leading 0 for : MovieID, CD-BOX-ID, VHS-ID, DVD ID, COVER NUMBER (moviecover.jpg, moviecover_01.jpg etc.. since there's only fifty possible covers one leading 0 would be enough). That would be quite nice for proper sorting...
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| Alessio Viti |
Posted - 16 Sep 2005 : 15:13:52
Hi Guys,
Finally I am come back 
I will try to take a look at it next two weeks.
Thank you for the patince 
Alessio |
| andymiller |
Posted - 28 Aug 2005 : 22:32:21
After lookin a bit more it looks like there are some tricky problems exporting from EMM to Excel. I'm also unable to export the BOX ID from the Excel exporter. But I can export the BOX ID with the 'Tab.txt' exporter. When I choose this, I get a different list of fields to export. When opening this in Excel I choose Fixed Width in step 1 of the wizard and then in step 2, I click the example to create my columns. It's ok to create 'garbage' columns in the wizard to delete later on the spreadsheet.
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| andymiller |
Posted - 28 Aug 2005 : 21:11:12
I think I can help a bit on the Excel export part. Excel defaults to expect a csv file to be comma delimited (Comma Seperated Values). The default in EMM is to use the semicolon instead. This can be changed in the Export dialog in EMM.
To make matters a bit more tricky though :< - Excel uses whatever delimiter was last used in Excel, and this is not always the comma. To change it you can select a column of data in Excel and choose,
Data,
Text to Columns,
Delimited,
and then select a new delimiter.
Hope this helps (and that I understood the export problem correctly)
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| Henry |
Posted - 16 Jun 2005 : 21:22:07
Nice review
I could add some to this thread
But lets wait for Alessio first |
| Alessio Viti |
Posted - 10 Jun 2005 : 19:44:14
Thank you IAN for this long topic, tomorrow I will carefully read it.
Alessio |
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