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Create Notes based on Excel Data


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I had the need to create 4000 notes based on excel data because tagging system in Evernote makes search way more easier than excel.

Also with Evernote I could create many Table of contents based on my needs. My excel data was well formatted - each row was going to one unique note.

 

After searching through this forum I realized that may it is impossible to do and I decided to copy painfully one note at a time.

 

Then IDEA!!!! came

  1. What if I create a note in Evernote, export evernote file (.enex)
  2. Open in notepad and view xml code
  3. Find out of table structure and modify to my needs
  4. Use vba Macro to convert each row as one note

I found a gentleman (Anton Fishman) on internet who worked on similar problem before and he helped me achieve my goal.

 

I can not attach excel here - but here is the link

 

People with good XML knowledge can help clean up the VBA code a bit to get better table format, that would be great.

Remember to change the path to your liking strFile = "C:\Users\1.enex"

 

I created my 4000 notes with required tags with click of a button, it took more time to Sync across devices than to create it. :)

It will create one big .enex file but when you import in windows or Mac machines with File-> import, it will create all notes for you.

I would appreciate people's feedback

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  • Level 5*

Hi.  Interesting idea.  You could also use Excel as a database to 'mail merge' your records into text files and import the files into Evernote,  or export Excel to html files and import from there....

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  • Level 5*

You could also use Excel as a database to 'mail merge' your records into text files and import the files into Evernote,  or export Excel to html files and import from there....

 

Neither of those suggestions is nearly a good as the solution provided by the OP, chemie.  For one thing, flooding your email account with 4,000 emails is NOT a good thing.  Also, I'm pretty sure that Evernote limits you to the number of emails to 200/day.

 

@chemie:  Great idea!   The only thought I have for improvement is to create a number of smaller ENEX files from Excel, rather than one large one.  If desired, each ENEX could correspond to a Notebook in EN.

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  • 1 year later...

Hey Gazumped, can you detail that out a little further. that would help big time! thanks!

On 7/5/2015 at 1:19 PM, gazumped said:

Hi.  Interesting idea.  You could also use Excel as a database to 'mail merge' your records into text files and import the files into Evernote,  or export Excel to html files and import from there....

 

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  • Level 5*

Hi. 

Try a small-scale standard Office mail merge - there's tons of video and support online.

This is on the premise that you have a bunch of notes saved in spreadsheet rows,  one note to a row,  and you want to export those cells as standalone files.  If you check out the Excel / Word help for your version it's pretty straightforward to treat the spreadsheet as a database and set up each note cell as a data field in a mail-merged document.  You'll be able to print to file,  so your records all end up saved in your preferred format - text / PDF etc.  The only major drawback is that the file names are generated by the process,  so you either choose something generic or edit them by hand.  On the last occasion I did this (which was a couple of years ago) I just tagged all the notes 'imported_<date>'

In some cases I guess when notes are exported to Excel from elsewhere,  you may get the original file name as one column in the spreadsheet.  If you set that field up too as part of the merge,  the notes would at least be searchable on the original names...

 

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  • 1 year later...
Em 05/07/2015 at 14:05, chemie disse:

Remember to change the path to your liking strFile = "C:\Users\1.enex"

After correcting the path error for writing the file. I was able to generate it, but I can not import it into evernote.
Evernote generates an error and I'm redirected to a temporary folder. With these files. Inside TXT is:
root and DTD name do not match 'table' and 'en-note'

Opening and ending tag mismatch: tbody line 1 and table

 

Could some1 point me in the right way... TIA!

erro_evernote_import.png

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  • Level 5*
9 hours ago, Thiago Pereira said:

Could some1 point me in the right way... TIA!

Have you looked at the generated .enex file to identify the error.  You'll need a text editor app.
As per the initial  post, export a sample file for comparison

Working with an xml file is complicated.  My preference would be generating text files as per the post below

 

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  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, Thiago Pereira said:

root and DTD name do not match 'table' and 'en-note'

Probably means that your ENML (.enex) file isn't formatted the way that Evernote wants. See the ENML format document: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enml.php.

 

1 hour ago, Thiago Pereira said:

Opening and ending tag mismatch: tbody line 1 and table

Seems pretty self-explanatory: you either have a <tbody> tag that's not matched with a closing <tbody/> tag, or a <table> tag that's not matched with a closing <table/> tag.

Both of these together would imply that you cannot just stick an unadorned HTML table into Evernote. At a minimum, you need to start at least with a <en-note. tag (and end with a cosing <en-note/> tag).

One thing you should do is create a table in Evernote, and export it to Evernote format (.enex), and that will give you an idea of how Evernote likes things...

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