Need Recommendation for Most feasible way to import data in Excel to Zotero

sheetalvn
Dear fellow Zotero Community members,
We have thousands of records in excel & want to know the most feasible way to import them into Zotero. (Each Excel Row would be a Zotero record). All suggestions/recommendations/experiences shared will be truly appreciated.
thanks in advance
A Zotero Newbie.
  • aborel
    edited December 9, 2023
    Excel or other tabulated formats are ather bad formats for publication metadata, where various fields can be repeated any number of times. So there is no standard way to do this, unfortunately.
    If your spreadsheet includes DOIs, ISBNs or similar identifers, you can use them to import the references in batch from external sources (Crossref, Library of Congress, ...).
    But maybe the spreadsheets were created using data from just a few convenient sources? If that is the case, perhaps you can capture the complete data from there - feel free to list these sources and someone can provide more detailed advice.
  • adamsmith
    Really depends on the spreadsheet, but there are some old threads here on using CONCAT in Excel to generate BibTeX files, which Zotero can import
  • emilianoeheyns
    RIS is also an easy format to transform to from excel. If you can put up a sample I can take a look.
  • sheetalvn
    edited December 12, 2023
    Thanks @emilianoeheyns i am including the Column titles in line 1 and column values in line 2..as i am not sure what u need exactly. Do let me know if you need multiple rows too.(Some values in the columns could be blank too..e.g. in this case Title is empty.
    FileName Date ContentType Category Sub-Category TitleEnglish Title KeyWords
    Memories-Sept-2023 30September-2020 FBPost Economy-India-Corona Corona-lessons Let Economic planning be decentralized at district levels #Corona_District_Level_Planning.
    I too will try to take a look at the RIS file format.
    thanks once again
    S
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited December 12, 2023
    Shouldn't be hard to convert, the equivalent RIS could look something like

    TY - ICOMM
    TI - Let Economic planning be decentralized at district levels
    DA - 30September-2020
    KW - Corona-lessons
    KW - Economy-India-Corona + Economy-India-Corona
    KW - #Corona_District_Level_Planning
    ER -

    Whether RIS will do the job depends -- I don't think the Zotero RIS imported does attachment import or collection creation.

    I've interpreted the input asFileName Date ContentType Category Sub-Category TitleEnglish Title KeyWords
    Memories-Sept-2023 30September-2020 FBPost Economy-India-Corona Corona-lessons Let Economic planning be decentralized at district levels #Corona_District_Level_Planning     but actually putting up a CSV somewhere is better.
  • adamsmith
    Zotero RIS import does include attachments (from L1 I believe) but not collections -- but doesn't look like either are relevant here?
  • emilianoeheyns
    Whether collections come into play depends on what the Category/Subcategory is supposed to do (I've mapped them to keywords now but the "Sub" hints at something hierarchical), and there's a column called "FileName".
  • sheetalvn
    Thanks @emilianoeheyns & @adamsmith for your inputs! Actually Filename can be ignored(or we would be deleting it). Initally we had a parent child relationship for Cat & SubCat but thinking of eliminating it & keeping it flat(like all siblings) and have up to 8 siblings instead.
    But mainly i would like to look into the CSV suggestion and some pointers for the same.
    Also ur above interpretation of the input is Correct.
    We are reconsidering to use the fields which can be used in the center pane as Columns instead of using the original Tag feature in the tab(our original cat & SubCategory we were to use them as Tags ) ...as we cannot include tags (except color coding them) in the center pane.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Loads of columns to choose from
  • sheetalvn
    edited December 15, 2023
    @emilianoeheyns U r right. Will try to minimize this number too...test the import first & then add more columns if needed. Pls. point me to the CSV suggestion u have mentioned earlier. Thanks once again.
  • emilianoeheyns
    That suggestion isn't a tool, I'm just saying it would be fairly easy to make a bespoke script that converts CSV into RIS. If you know how data from the CSV would map to Zotero fields I wouldn't mind making such a script for you.
  • sheetalvn
    Yes sure i realized its a workaround method to do the needful & not a tool. I will firm up the list of columns i mentioned earlier & get back to u on the CSV to Zotero field mapping soon. Thanks a bunch for offering to help on this. @emilianoeheyns actually i cant thank you enough!
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