I have a long, but simple, Excel file of Spanish/English vocabulary words. In the file there are only 2 columns, but the file does have about 1400 paired entries. Many of the paired cell entries are just the Spanish word, and the corresponding English word, but in some cells I include additional verbiage (e.g, more than one single meaning for a given word, where to place accent marks, etc.) One of the characters that I used in about 30 or so cells is the following symbol: “>”. Now, when I use the import file function in ANKI, of the 1400 (or so) paired entries in the file only the 30 cells with that specific symbol (namely, the “>” ) are pulled into the designated deck. Nothing else from the complete file gets imported into the deck. I’m totally baffled as to why. In terms of the format of the deck, I am using the “Basic” format, and I have never fiddled with any filters or anything like that. So, why would ANKI import those, and only those cells? Any suggestions or other assistance anyone can provide, would be greatly appreciated.
Also, in case it helps, I am familiar with the need to convert my Excel file to the cvs/UTF-8 format, and I did that with the file referenced above. I even followed instructions I found in the ANKI manual that took me through opening the file in Notepad, changing encoding to UTF-16, then encoding back to UTF-8, etc. None of that worked. Still same result . . . the full file does not come in.
Again, I would be most grateful for any assistance, ideas, etc. Thanks…
Rumo: thank you for considering my issue and providing input. I have continued to work my issue by continuing to try and re-try the import process, including making sure that “allow HTMP in fields” was not enabled. Still no change in the result, I’m still only getting about 30 of the entries to come in. In case it is helpful, I’ll pass along that when ANKI completes the import, I get a message saying: “31 notes added, 0 notes updated, 1377 notes unchanged.” I don’t really know what the program is intending to be understood by the words 1377 notes “unchanged”, but it certainly appears that the program recognizes that there were about 1400 (paired) entries in the file. Since 1377 of those entries in the Excel cvs file are not making it into the ANKI file, it strikes me that ANKI is somehow doing some sort of filtering, which, to my knowledge, I have not asked it to do. (Again, I’m a very basic ANKI user and I have not done any setting adjustments or other tweaks to the program settings.) Curiously, I tried to import a different Excel cvs file, this one having about 400 entries. Again, I got a similar message saying about 320 notes were added and about 80 were unchanged. Obviously, more entries in this file were imported successfully, but it is likewise a total puzzler as to why close to 25% of the file deck was simply dumped by ANKI via the import process.
I mention the foregoing, because it leads me to ask my question in a slightly different way. That being, does anyone know whether there is any feature or setting in the ANKI program that operates as a filter during the import process? In other words, could ANKI be looking at the imported file and deciding that, if certain cells in the imported file have certain characters in the cell, then that particular part of the file will not be included in the import, but it is included in the count of how many notes were added, updated, or changed. Again, “changed” seems to mean that those particular notes were dumped by the program. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the program would be designed to do that, but that is what it appears to be doing. Something is triggering the program to “change” (ie., delete) notes that were in the original Excel cvs file (this is obvious because the program is keeping track of the number of notes that get changed in the import process, and it leads me to ask whether anyone knows what criteria the the program would use to decide to delete (“change”) any given note? To my way of thinking, if the Excel file is properly coded so that some of the data in the file can come in, why wouldn’t that proper coding apply to all of the data in the file?
Apologies for the long note, but I thought this added info and question framing might be relevant to the diagnosis. Once again, thanks to any and all that may be able to solve the mystery.
I get a message saying: “31 notes added, 0 notes updated, 1377 notes unchanged.” I don’t really know what the program is intending to be understood by the words 1377 notes “unchanged”
It means these words are already in your collection somewhere, so Anki doesn’t import them. If you want to import them nevertheless, just select the “Import even if existing note has the same field” option.
You probably don’t want to do that though. I’d recommend you search for some of the card content in the Browse screen. That will reveal the existing cards, and you can then look at the Deck column to see where the existing cards are located.
Abdo: thank you very, very much! Changing that setting did it, and it enabled me to import the entire content of my CSV file into the selected deck. I would have never thought to make that adjustment, so thanks again for helping me out.
Dae: thank you too for considering my issue and providing input. I know I have some duplication in my various decks and I will probably do some paring. But, as you may have seen from my original post, I’m using ANKI as Spanish/English flash cards. So, I have a deck that is generally collected vocabulary words of all types. But, sometimes I just want so study a focused group of vocabulary words, like, say, adjectives. So, have a “General” deck and a “Adjectives” deck. Clearly there can be some duplication between the two but I think that works best for my study approach.
Thanks again to all who considered the issue and especially for the guidance.
