Importing Generic CSV Recipe Data into Insight-Live

How to organize your recipes into a worksheet of recipe rows and material columns, save it as a CSV file and import into Insight-Live.com

A. Insight-live

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If Insight-live cannot import a specific recipe format, that can often be converted to a worksheet that it can handle (saved in CSV format). Some people have even used spreadsheet software to maintain all of their historical recipe data.

Transcript:
We are going to import data from a spreadsheet into Insight-live.
-Click the Import/Export icon
-Choose the file type to import
-CSV is a very generic format
-Click example. This is CSV data. CSV stands for comma separated values (the columns are separated by commas)

-I will open this same data in my spreadsheet program, Libre Calc.
-First, notice the quotes here. Why? Because these numbers are euro format, the quotes tell the importer these commas do not split a column
-Now open it.

-But you will find a surprising amount of flexibility here because you can use all the power of Excel or organize your recipes
-Insight expects to see the data in this general pattern.

These are the two header lines, they must be here
-Name is mandatory as the first column name, it titles the recipes of course
-The keywords (or description) column is optional
If it is not supplied color, cone and type will be combined to form the description in Insight-live
-Code, date, batch, picture, typecodes, location, comments will be mapped into the corresponding fields in Insight-Live

The Mapping header row is also mandatory
-It must start with Mapping and contain tags to ignore columns or map them to notes (others are materials)
-The firing column will be mapped into the notes (with a heading matching the name of the column)
-The rating column will be ignored

When my data is ready I need to make a CSV file
-Choose Save As, choose file type of CSV, turn on Automatic File Extension and click Edit Filter Settings, choose Save
-Confirm use of CSV format and ignore warning about formatting loss (do not need it)
-Set the field delimiter as comma, set text delimiter (only used if col contains comma); click OK.
Close the spreadsheet and go back to Insight-live

-On the import/export page choose file type, choose the file, prepend my name to beginning of each recipe then upload
-Click home

Click one of the recipes imported
-Material data has been parsed, the notes data has been distributed into the notes box, my name as been prepended
-The color and cone have been combined into the description
-A typecode has been assigned to each imported recipe also (to identify its source)

-If I do not like the way the import went: The batch number is the key to removing the imports
-Click Advanced Search and search batch 1. Click Delete Batch, confirm, delete.
-I will do the import again to demo how a typecode is assigned to each incoming recipe
You can thus identify the source of these recipes in the future, both by batch and typecode.

By Tony Hansen
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