Hi and welcome to the IQ forum

 

1- "field mapping file" :

 

I haven't re-tried it in the last 2 months, but importing a "field mapping" txt file only serves to map your imported fields to the right IQ fields. It doesn't import and create new "fields" per se into IQ. Fields need to be created beforehand in IQ to be mapped to the imported CSV file and to be able to use the "field mapping file". Normally, in most cases, you won't need to create new fields in IQ beforehand... unless you're importing a CSV with pretty specialized data.

 

Concerning a potential "on the fly" creation of field which don't already exist  in IQ when a CSV file is imported : I proposed this a while ago. I think it's in Mantis, if not, I'll add it.

 

2- "manually enter new field name"

 

IQ can only map those fields that have almost the same name as the fields your importing. Try it, you'll see.

You'll need to manually select (map) the fields to which you want your imported fields to correspond only when those don't exist in IQ or have a different name.

 

I'll look at the manual section for text file importing and see if that's clear enough.

 

Did you have a quick look at the manual, in particular the first 2 sections ? It's not perfect but I think it helps a bit to understand the basics.

Forgot one question :

 

 [why can't IQ] ... "automatically create a grid with the fields as columns?"

 

Good question... It could, but it would probably have to arbitrarily assign an extra field to identify the newly imported items, and then create a grid using that field as the source. IQ does it when it imports from EverNote, so I guess it would be easy to add the feature to CSV import.

 

One thing though : once you understand IQ's mechanism, it's easy to create a new grid and display all the items you want in it. 1- First search for your new items in the DB ( you can use the journal grid for that and select todays date in the date toolbar). 2- Create a new grid (using the New grid option on the "Grid Context" toolbar, or by using the Manage Grid dialog (button is on the toolbar also, or in the view menu in the grids sub-menu), 3- Drag and drop all the items frofrom the journal grid to the new grid. That's it.

 

You have to understand that items don't really belong to any grid but are displayed in grids depending on various filters. That's it. Grids can affect items (add field values to them etc., but items don't "belong to them")

BTW, aucanic : if you read the help file and see stuff that's hard to understand and you'd like to add details, etc., feel free to propose some changes and edit the content. (Just write what you changed in the text box at the bottom of the editing page)