My apologies for my tardy continuance of this thread. I had decided to make my first foray into the game with my books database, as the most interesting. I soon realised that it was miles out of date, and that there was little point in creating yet another out of date database. So, over the Xmas peiod I spent ages checking, editing and moving books . Out of the 1100, odd entries, I was down to the last half a dozen, when on a 'save' the Data application failed and left me with A Data file which gave only a 'Corrupt' message when it came to load it. Fortunately, I'd created a CSV file before embarking on the adventure. Here, I discovered that importing a .csv file does not create the database structure. To get this I had to go back to a very out of date backup, create a new database on it, free of content and import the data into it. So I had a working database, but back to square one. All this on the netBook, still my favourite piece of kit. In the meantime, I tried the csv and transfer, with another database. This one was 'Elements', one of the databses available for download when the genre was popular. As the name implies, it was data on the elements, both physical and atomic. So long as we do not have another supernova, the data will remain the same. Which is more than can be said of 'Books' So, along with mass, melting and boiling points, etc were details of isotopes, half lives and abundances. This went well, transferred from the netBook to the Gemini. here, a further problem. The csv file has no information as to structure, so importing would create the database but without the field headings to indicate what the content was. However, the Gemini database does the process in two stages. The first establishes the structure, and the second imports the data proper, into the database. Nicely, it seems the application does in fact, as far as I can ascertain, assign the content type correctly (text, number, date etc.). I had to go back to the netBook, copy all the field names into the Gemini, by hand and then move to the second stage, and import the data. It all worked well.
I've now completed the books database update, with hopefully no errors. I did find quite a lot of entries for which there were no books! No doubt, lost, stolen, strayed, given away, junked. Returning to transferring 'books'. It all went well until I opened the new file, when I found that one of the important fields, that of the books location in my collection was missing. Being missing all the following fields were misplaced up one level. Most unhelpful. Whereas my original data was of 'Book Title','Author','Location','Subject','Owner', the data was now set out with the data for 'Subject in the field for 'Location'. and all down the line. A lot of the books were collection of short stories from such classic SciFi magazines as Analog and Galaxy, where the contents too, figured in the database. I finally found the reason, by opening the .csv file in a text editor. For some odd reason the export function on the netBook has assigned the'Location', and 'Owner' to the last but one, and the last field in the series. At the moment, I'm at a bit of a loss how to put this right. I suppose I could open the file in a spreadsheet, on the PC, and move the whole columns back to where they should be
