paste a table into a note

[RightPaddock 34]

I want to 'paste' tabular data into an existing note, and see it as an Evernote table

 

I have the table in a csv file, which I can convert to a table in an HTML file (using CSVFileView)

 

How can this be done?  

 

tia - rp

 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

After you view the table in CSVFileView, just select the table, and copy/paste into an Evernote Note.

BTW, I have found that using MS Word to create tables, and then pasting into Evernote provides the best result.

[RightPaddock 34]

After you view the table in CSVFileView, just select the table, and copy/paste into an Evernote Note.

BTW, I have found that using MS Word to create tables, and then pasting into Evernote provides the best result.

 

I tried that but it pastes lines of text, I want an Evernote Note Table - to which I can add/delete rows and columns

 

I tried opening the HTML file (created by CSVFileView) in Firefox and doing a copy/paste of the table into my note, I got a table, to which I could add rows but not columns. 

 

I also tried clipping the page - uh,uh - all that was offered was Clip URL! This is because the clipper only offers full service for uri's with a prefix of 'html', if the same pageis loaded from a 'file' the clipper offers a diminished service :eek:

 

So I tried opening the same HTML file in Word and doing a copy/paste of the table into my note.  I got a table, to which I could add both rows and columns.   I guess that's a solution, albeit somewhat heavy handed.

 

Attention developers

The Table 'widget' needs some simple improvements. 

Fit column width to data would be nice

As would Move column left/right and Move row up/down. 

The Clipper should offer a full service on file: uris

 

Thanks RP

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@RightPaddock:  It is because of issue like you are experiencing that let me to use MS Word.  

So, I copy a table from Excel, or a web page and paste into Word, then copy the Word table and paste into an EN Note.

 

But I agree, Evernote should properly handle the paste of a table from all sources.

[RightPaddock 34]

@JMichael - I was initially surprised that I would have to use Word to get a table into a EN Note.  I had briefly thought of doing it via OneNote, but I had no joy with it.  But I got to learn something about Word Tables, like you can sort them, which means I don't need to use Excel!! 

 

To anyone reading this, you might need to set the table to Autofit cell widths before you coffee/pasta it into your EN note.  Otherwise you could end up with fixed width cells, which may not be what you want.

 

Actually it's better than I first thought - good ol' Word to the rescue. I'm marking this as Solved, elegantly? - not particularly, effectively?  - very much so.

 

Thanks again - RP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

To anyone reading this, you might need to set the table to Autofit cell widths before you coffee/pasta it into your EN note.  Otherwise you could end up with fixed width cells, which may not be what you want.

 

Excellent point.  Most of the tables I use in Evernote I create from scratch in Word, and I always set the Word table to "autofit to text".

[RightPaddock 34]

5@JMichael - I've noticed what may, for me, be a significant glitch.

 

If, in a table that originates from a Word table cut & paste, I add a column to the right it gets added to the left, and if I add a column to the left it also gets added to the left.  This makes it hard to add a column to an existing table. 

 

It makes no difference if I create the table in Word via the CSV->HTML route, or via inserting a table into a blank document - column insertions are always done to the left.  In fact the more I look at it the worse it gets - if I insert a row the last column falls off the edge   It's an absolute shambles.

 

A table created in EN doesn't have these problems.

 

I'm hoping I can overcome this problem by doing something in Word before doing the copy/paste.  If not then I don't have a solution, the ability to insert additional rows and columns is critical in the context of what I'm trying to do.

 

Despite all the glitz and glamour of semantic webs, smartphones, wearables, Google's driverless cars, Amazon's drones hovering over us and now Microsofts augmented reality helmets... its just as hard to get data out of one application into another application as it ever was.  In fact it it's even harder -- where's DDE when you need it. 

 

"Oh we don't need that," the script kiddies told us.  "We can screen scrape it off the web!" 

 

I hoped we'd get away from all that nonsense when we stopped screen scraping 3270 screens - but alas not.

 

RP

[jefito 5,589]

DDE is still around. Apparently regrettably.

 

Cut'n'paste works pretty well for me, very often. I'm sure that there's some other CSV -> clean HTML solution that you can find somewhere. I'd suggest trying out that new-fangled method they call the Google (you know, that thing that didn't really get going until DDE was virtually unfeasible). 

[RightPaddock 34]

DDE is still around. Apparently regrettably.

 

Cut'n'paste works pretty well for me, very often. I'm sure that there's some other CSV -> clean HTML solution that you can find somewhere. I'd suggest trying out that new-fangled method they call the Google (you know, that thing that didn't really get going until DDE was virtually unfeasible). 

 

Where's the unlike button jefito |-O

 

I respectively suggest you do three things

1. only post replies to questions I raise if you can make a positive contribution,
2. never direct snide remarks in my direction, unless you have factual evidence to support the false assumptions on which they are based,
3. get an understanding and appreciation of  'irony'.  You obviously got a grade F last time you tried.

RP

[jefito 5,589]

So it's ok for you to post ranty snark, but no-one else can reply in kind? Are you saying that your post was entirely positive?

 

BTW, I made a suggestion to find a workaround, since the currently suggestions don't work as well as you'd like. It was, in tone, along the lines of your post, and about as ironic. You did do a web search for such workarounds, correct? 

[RightPaddock 34]

@jefito - find me a something in this or this that addresses my specific issues - adding rows and columns to a table pasted from Word.  Or suggest a a search term that would lead me to an alternative solution.  I also looked for 'how to paste a HTML table into Evernote', everything lead me back to opening the HTML in Word and then copy/paste the Word table into the note.  And that works fine (see my last para in post #5)... until I try to append additional columns or prepend additional rows to the table. My experience is when I do that then the table falls apart. 

 

As I reported this does not happen if the table is created in Evernote,  But going down that route would necessitate I enter all the data manually.  Given I'm talking about ~2000 Notes each with a 5-8 column table of between 1 and 1000+ rows that ain't going to happen.

 

Have you tried to replicate the problems I am reporting here?  Did you get the same result on appending a column, or prepending a row to a Word originated table in EN?   If Yes and No, could you please post the relevant docx and enex files.

 

Another alternative would be to leave the data where it is - in a SQLite database.  Can you suggest how I might have EN access an external SQLite database to populate a table dynamically?  I could put the necessary primary key data to the external database into the note. 

 

Another alternative is for me to find a way to 'drive' the application that 'owns' the SQLite database from within Evernote.  Something similar to how I can drive Evernote from within the other application via the evernote:///view/... links I can paste there.  I'll probably need to run a command.  Anyone know if that's possible, I couldn't find anything useful in in the first few pages of this.

 

RP

[CalS 5,280]

Out of interest,what is the use case you are solving by exporting the data from its current home and inserting it into tables in 2000 notes, some of a 8x1000 size?  EN is not known as an exemplary handler of tables, which I'm pretty sure this exercise is proving.

[RightPaddock 34]

Out of interest,what is the use case you are solving by exporting the data from its current home and inserting it into tables in 2000 notes, some of a 8x1000 size?  EN is not known as an exemplary handler of tables, which I'm pretty sure this exercise is proving.

 

@csihilling - I'm trying to break the shackles of an application whose primary features I don't actually use.  My primary reason for using the application is that it imposes discipline with respect to the storage and classification of texts. 

 

I have successfully, and fairly easily, integrated the other application with EN via evernote:/// links.  I was looking for a way to do the reverse. 

 

Imagine I jump to an EN note via a link I pasted into the other application.  Now imagine that within EN I want see what texts I have for the entity whose note I just jumped to, or the texts for a related entity (related via another Evernote link).  Unfortunately the other application doesn't publish anything akin to evernote link, but I can get a csv of the texts associated with an entity.  I was looking for a way I could push the csv into the entity note as a table, one column of which would have file links to the actual text.

 

Whilst the other application is very powerful, in many respects it's also quite rigid.  So I am hoping to combine its formal persona with EN's free wheeling nature

 

FWIW I spent most of my 40+ years in IT managing systems integration projects in financial services, many of which were run on skunkworks basis.  Back  then I had a small team of wizards at my disposal.  Now I have to do it all myself

 

RP

[jefito 5,589]

Ok, first things first: the Evernote Windows client's Import Folder feature can import some HTML files. I'm not sure what the limits are, but I just did a couple of experiments by doing a copy operation on some HTML in my browser (one was just some text, the other was a table in the Evernote web browser). I used a tool called Clipboard Format Spy to examine the HTML text on the clipboard, and then copied the relevant portion (<html><body> ...</body></html>) to a text editor, and then saved that into an Evernote import folder. Both came into Evernote just fine. So that's really roundabout, but points the way forward: a web search on "Convert CSV to HTML" turns up a fair number of hits. Find a tool that you like and test it out on your case. It may be as simple as that. Heck, that's sort of stuff isn't difficult to do if you have any sort of programming skills, or you could go straight to .ENEX if you wanted -- that's not much of a stretch.

 

Whether this meets all of your requirements in terms of how tables ought to behave in Evernote is another matter. Table handling in Evernote is known to be somewhat primitive. But from the side of getting it into Evernote in the first place, I think that that's entirely feasible, though I haven't gone any further in pursuing it myself. And you can probably automate it, too. As I say, I've pasted MS Word tables and Excel spreadsheets into Evernote and they suit my somewhat primitive needs. But the HTML generated from Office products is pretty heavy with Office-y sort of formatting/styling code. My preference would be to have cleaner HTML on the input side.

 

Oh, and: Evernote cannot access an external SQLlite database, much less let you drive it. It knows about its own database, and that's it.

[RightPaddock 34]

@jefito - thank you, I assume your referring to the Tools->Import Folders... feature.  I admit to not knowing it was there until now.  I saw mention of it somewhere in my travels, but I looked for it in File->Import, it wasn't there so I decided it must be a feature of Premium. 

 

As I wrote in my opening post I use CSVFileView to 'convert' csv files to HTML, are you aware of any pitfalls it might create. 

 

But having Word in the loop has its benefits, its easy to a) edit the column headers, sort the table, and c) strip timezone offsets from dates (no - I can't do those things in the other application Ψ²).  Here's a thought - I have the wherewithal to convert a DOCX to raw HTML. 

 

Regarding programming: I more or less gave up on that when C, assembler and psychodrama were no longer de rigueur.  And now there are too many black holes in the grey matter

 

RP

[jefito 5,589]

Hmmm. C still works (qsort, all of that); basically any C++ compiler has a C compiler hiding inside, waiting to get out (I wouldn't go back to C from C++ if I could help it, but I did start with C in '83, so that's pretty familiar territory for me). Generating HTML isn't that hard, and you could customize things the way you'd want. Oh, the fun you'd have...

 

On the other hand, you could just import your CSV into Word, and add those as attachments to a note. You wouldn't be able to view the tables in Evernote, but maybe your use case doesn't care.

[RightPaddock 34]

@jefito - progress

 

I have an embedded table in a note - its bare bones (no table or cell borders, no alignment, no shading, no padding etc) but I can prepend rows and append columns without the table falling apart.   Is there anyway I can attach a style sheet to the table

 

Yes I could use an attached file but its handler would have to have the capability of inserting rows and columns, editing cells, including the creation of file:/// links that when clicked start other programs; all of which Evernote can readily do.  And I would prefer it not be a program in which I'm likely to be 'already' doing something, which more or less cuts out DOCX, XLSX and CSV.  I guess I could use a format from one of the OOo forks

 

Once I iron out the formatting wrinkles and do some thorough testing I'll report back .  My planning assumption is that I can't attach a style sheet, so I'm going to try to find something that will transform the html+css into in-line styled html. 

 

RP

 

Two of the reasons I gave up writing code, were:  The advent of verbose declarative languages, and the popularity of weakly typed interpreted code.  But the main one was that I got bored with the tedium.  My pet hate today are languages that use code indentation to define scope of control, they remind me of RPG and COBOL

[jefito 5,589]

No style sheet, but you can use embedded styling. I think. Something to experiment with, anyways. Rock on!

[RightPaddock 34]

No style sheet, but you can use embedded styling. I think. Something to experiment with, anyways. Rock on!

 

Indeed you can, I found I could get inline styling rather than css class styling.  But it ain't very smart, each cell is individually styled, with no inheritance from the row or column styling, as a consequence the cells in an inserted row or columns are unstyled.   I'll be back 2mora.

 

RP

[CalS 5,280]

You guys are killing me!  

 

Thanks for the use case explanation @RP.  Good luck!

[RightPaddock 34]

I gave up on using csv's converted into HTML tables, it was becoming too cumbersome.  Instead I am using one of the features of the other application that I've not used.  It has a 'server' facility, in one of its persona's it can serve up list of texts, the url for such a list is based on the id of the row in the relevant entity table.

 

So I extracted a csv with id and name from one such table, edited it into a file of xxmklink commands which create a name.LNK file (shortcut) containing ".../chrome.exe" "http:.../sources/id"

 

The .LNK files are copied to ENs autoadd folder.  I merge the Note with the LNK into the existing note for the entity (based on name).  When I click on the link file the list of texts for that entity is delivered via the Google Chrome browser.

 

Why create .LNK files and not just put the urls into the entity note?  Because that would invoke the default browser (for me that's Firefox) and I'd prefer that it not be used for this purpose.  So I use a short cut to Chrome passing it the url as the first argument.

 

Conceptually this a more elegant solution - what I lose though is visibility of the list within the note itself. In part that's why I'm using Chrome to deliver the lists, at least they will be easy to find and wont be lost in the clutter of tabs I normally have in firefox,

 

Thanks for all your your help.

 

RP

 

 

[EHSI 0]

I realize this thread is a bit old but I thought I would post my results.

I was able to duplicate the 'paste on the wrong side' glitch that RightPaddock experienced in pasting a table from and outside source. My source was Open Office Calc but the results were the same. I solved the problem by creating a single row table in EN with the needed number of columns and then highlighting the cells before I pasted from Calc.

When I paste in this fashion, inserting works correctly.

Hope that helps (also hope it isn't a fluke)