I’ve quite a lot of stuff to import from FileMaker - a mix of short and not quite so short documents (the longest is around 2000-2500 words). The fields to import with each document are few - Create Date, Modify Date, Unique ID #, and a few labels which would become Scrivener ‘keywords’.
But, how to import FM Pro records into a Scrivener project?
Given that there is no way to import this kind of data from external sources in the first place, it doesn’t really matter what the source format is. You would need some kind of utility that could bridge the gap that modifies a Scrivener project directly, or creates one from scratch. It would probably be easiest to just export the meta-data so that it appears in the text chunks themselves, and then port that data from the text area into Scrivener’s meta-data systems.
I think FileMaker can export as an Excel spreadsheet, or as a tab-delimited file. Would either of those options work? Basically, can Scrivener import a bunch of records all at one time, and then treat each as a separate document or page?
It wouldn’t be a major disaster if not, as there are only around 200 records in the database, (my novel is a different, separate FM database), so I COULD do it manually. I’d just rather not if there’s another way.
That it can definitely do, it’s getting the creation date and keywords and all of that ported over that I don’t see a way of doing automatically.
The File/Import/Import & Split… command can handle most situations where you have a text document with dividers (“divider”, for our purposes, can even be a single carriage return) that you want imported as many documents instead of one.
I don’t know CSV would be the best approach, because then you’d get a bunch of files with one line of CSV data in them (assuming you split by carriage return)—I’d rather just have the text content split up this way, and worry about the meta-data manually. But if that is your best option it should work fine.
Thanks Amber - that sounds like my best option (I can always add the metadata dates into the text via FMP, then somehow extract them again in Scrivener if I can.),