The dummy is me. I have a kind of card index of vocabulary and I want to put it onto the computer. Each card has several elements such as rank, part of speech, definition and example usages.
So I guess I’m looking at some kind of database. But I don’t know how to use database programs and I’m hoping that the process doesn’t have to be too painful.
So can anyone recommend a database or other program, and any kind of tutorial on how to set it up? I need simplicity, but I also want flexibility as to how I can use the data in future. For example, I’d like to be able to order the “cards” according to various different criteria, and I’d like to be able to export part or all of the database to Word.
That’s an excellent idea, at least to get me started. Right now I have about 300 cards and it seems from the article that you linked to that Excel should be able to handle that OK.
I don’t use a standalone terminology manager program at present, but it sounds like you either need one of those or need to learn how to set up a database to handle all the criteria you want to include. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but it depends on how much free time you have and how friendly you feel toward computers in the first place. Otherwise, you could do a quick google on something like ‘terminology management software’ and just see what pops up, to get an idea.
Handling the vocab in Excel is a great idea, though. You can always keep several spreadsheets and easily import all or part of them into the program or database you eventually decide to use.
[quote=“ironlady”]I don’t use a standalone terminology manager program at present, but it sounds like you either need one of those or need to learn how to set up a database to handle all the criteria you want to include. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but it depends on how much free time you have and how friendly you feel toward computers in the first place. Otherwise, you could do a quick google on something like ‘terminology management software’ and just see what pops up, to get an idea.
Handling the vocab in Excel is a great idea, though. You can always keep several spreadsheets and easily import all or part of them into the program or database you eventually decide to use.[/quote]Thanks very much. I’d never heard of a terminology manager before but after some Googling I got the basic idea.
It sounds like a great idea but as there will only ever be a maximum of 1000 word-meanings I think that the expense and the investment of time would rule out using dedicated software like that. (Also it’s not for purposes of translation – it will be monolingual).
It would be easy to enter such a word list into Microsoft Access, because you can choose which categories to add.
But I’d go for Excel myself. It would be easy to read and manipulate. With Excel you can sort the data by columns. Either way you go, it will take about the same amount of time to enter the data, and you can convert from one to the other fairly easily.
Thanks for the link, Feiren. Looks like a nice flashcard program – maybe a bit like Supermemo?
I don’t think it’ll do what I need though. What I’m after is a way firstly to organise card-index type information, and secondly to incorporate selections of that information into wordprocessed documents.
I’m going with the spreadsheet option at the moment. I’m using Open Office’s Calc rather than Excel, but they have very similar functions.
Could anyone help me with a specific problem?
I’ve got field names set up like this:
Level number Rank by frequency Word Part of speech Definition Example
They’re at the top of the spreadsheet, so each row below corresponds to one card from my index.
There are four “Levels” so far and what I want to be able to do is export the cards from one level only into the word processor so that they look like this:
Word 1 Part of speech
Definition
Example
Word 2 Part of speech
Definition
Example
and so on. Is there any easy way of doing this? I’ve been playing about with “export” and “save as” but haven’t figured anything out so far.
Umm This is probably not going to help you too much, but the way I would do this would be to set up a postgresql database (www.postgresql.org), use perl’s DBD::Pg module to access the database. and then print to Word using the Win32::Ole perl modules. You could also use the tools available in python or ruby to do this.
An alternative approach would be using the Visual Basic tools in Excel to print to Word. I don’t know if you can do this to Open Office.
And why not create an html page instead of using a word processor?
I don’t know Open Calc - but if it’s anything like Excel, the following should work:
Cut and paste your Excel info into Word. It should appear in table format. Select the whole table, then in the menu bar click Table > Convert > Table to text. In the Tabe to text box select the tab that says ‘divide by paragraph’ (or something like that, my Word here is in Chinese so I’m not sure). Hey presto!
[quote=“Feiren”]Umm This is probably not going to help you too much, but the way I would do this would be to set up a postgresql database (www.postgresql.org), use perl’s DBD::Pg module to access the database. and then print to Word using the Win32::Ole perl modules. You could also use the tools available in python or ruby to do this.
An alternative approach would be using the Visual Basic tools in Excel to print to Word. I don’t know if you can do this to Open Office.[/quote]Thanks Feiren. I was afraid it was going to involve some heavy stuff like this.
Could anyone think of anything simpler? It doesn’t have to be elegant as long as it works. I thought of setting up the spreadsheet so that the field names run down the first column, rather than along the top. Each subsequent column would be one of my cards. It’s a lot easier to cut and paste individual columns, rather than rows, into the format I want in the word processed document. But I believe that spreadsheets don’t handle hundreds of columns very well. Hundreds of rows could be OK, but not columns. Am I right in thinking this?
[quote=“Feiren”]And why not create an html page instead of using a word processor?[/quote]Well, I need to incorporate the information into word processed documents, and also add more text between each of the “cards”.
[quote=“Taffy”]I don’t know Open Calc - but if it’s anything like Excel, the following should work:
Cut and paste your Excel info into Word. It should appear in table format. Select the whole table, then in the menu bar click Table > Convert > Table to text. In the Tabe to text box select the tab that says ‘divide by paragraph’ (or something like that, my Word here is in Chinese so I’m not sure). Hey presto![/quote]Great stuff! Thanks!
I save the spreadsheet as HTML, then insert the HTML table into an OO Writer document. I convert it to text and divide at paragraphs, and it’s exactly how I want it.
I can’t just cut and paste because it pastes a graphic, not a table. But it’s not much hassle to save as HTML.