Submitted by gregory on 2020/10/02 06:29
I wish to move on from my current use of Microsoft Word for my research journal towards the use of InfoQube. The reason for wishing to do this is that by using InfoQube I can classify and tag journal entries. This probably needs what I hope will be a fairly small product development in InfoQube to take on multiple RichText field entries. 

Specifically, the journal is structured as a table with two columns, one being date and the other being RichText: embedded tables, images, hyperlinks, et cetera which together constitute a journal entry. The Word document has become very large, about 3000 rows, unwieldy and feels fragile. However, it is a nightmare prospect to have to go manually through that journal, copying the rich text item-by-item and converting the date to an IQ-acceptable format. Concerning the dates, I cannot do what I would normally do, which is to go via Excel, because of the multimedia elements - specifically embedded tables -  included in certain journal entries. I can of course store such multimedia for single items because I have parameterised InfoQube to use Microsoft Word as the RichText editor, but even here there are problems.

Here's a spoof journal entry:
 

01/10/2020 Thursday

Here is some text.

 

Here is an image:

 

 

Here is an embedded table, including Word fields (in this case, these are citations each of which is stored as a Word field) and a hyperlink to a file:

 

Zotero citation

Hyperlink

(Turing 1952)

C:\Users\Mark\Google Drive\x\Sources\Turing - 1952 - The chemical basis of morphogenesis.pdf

(Wittgenstein 1922)

C:\Users\Mark\Google Drive\x\Sources\Wittgenstein, L., 1922.pdf

 

 

Neither the Word field nor the image survive straightforward copy-and-paste.
 
  1. Is there a straightforward way in which to upload multiple items to the documents pane in InfoQube? If there is no such existing way, could consideration be given to what I think would be a fairly straightforward enhancement to InfoQube that would ease this task?
  2. Why are Word-specific features, notably fields; and images, not surviving copy-and-paste?

Comments

Hi Mark,
 
IQ can batch import text and image files, but this is a rather special case. 
 
Perhaps you could find a MS Word add-on to split your table into a series of files...
 
Another option would be to save your document in HTML format and write a small program to parse it (using <tr> tags as delimiters)
A small project for a junior programmer / student
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

gregory

2020/10/02 15:42

Permalink

 
Thanks for the suggestions. The HTML route is unattractive because the document includes hundreds of Microsoft Word fields, which would be lost in an HTML save. Splitting to multiple Word documents does not save much time over a manual, row-by-row examination.
 
In an ideal world, InfoQube would have a clearly-documented API with lots of emergent functions.
 
But, NO, that is NOT the priority either!
 
The proportion of entries with embedded tables, fields, etc is not very high and a manual approach - over time - probably makes best sense.
 
Best regards,
 
Mark GREGORY, Saumur, UTC+2