Excel to Bookends

[stanretoma]

I am an oldie but complete newbie to much of the PC (I now have a Mac) and software world. For that reason forgive previous mistakes:

I have a lengthy book collection of around 1400 books. I now know I was possibly wrong to create a record of these books using Microsoft Excel. I am trying to get this spreadsheet list that includes: Title, Author, Publisher, City, Year and ISBN number - into Bookends. I have somewhat been running around in circles and testing the patience of sonnysoftware support. Can anyone help me achieve my goal? Otherwise I fear I'll be entering each book individually into Bookends. My purpose is to link the Bookends material with projects in Scrivener and my extensive Notes archive located in DevonThink Office Pro. Many thanks - in hope.

Update and 'closure':

In the end I have used Zotero's fabulous ISBN engine and patiently typed in every book ISBN - that I own - and then inserted kindle books by hand. My library is now complete within Zotero and ready to copy across to Bookends. Many thanks for all the support. Before I go, can anyone tell me why, suddenly, Bookends is asking me continually to log-in with my Apple ID (I guess its the iCloud backup?) and when I fill-in the details it informs me that the action can not be carried out or, my Apple ID is incorrect. I close box and ten seconds later its asking me again to log-in....... Starting to get frustrated......... Appreciate any steer.....

[nh220]

I believe, though not 100% sure, that Endnote can import a spreadsheet and Bookends can import Endnote records flawlessly. This post from Endnote forum might be helpful: https://community.endnote.com/t5/EndNot ... rue#M24388 (if the link does not work, just Google CSV into Endnote - this should be an early hit).

You do have to modify your spreadsheet to conform to Endnote specs and then import into a new Endnote library. You can then select all Endnote references and import into Bookends.

Just a word of caution though: Endnote does not run well on Mac anymore and you will get warnings and it will be slow, but it should work (especially as long as you do not mess with PDFs in Endnote). It is also a bit of a pain to uninstall.

I don't know if any other citation software programs can import CSV files. I am pretty sure Zotero does not do this without mucking around with python, but maybe Mendeley, Readcube, or Paperile does (I doubt it though).

[Jon]

I don't know if this will work for journal articles in Excel, but it looks interesting.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... ?hl=en-US

Jon
Sonny Software

[stanretoma]

Thanks for the suggestions - much appreciated. I have Mendeley and Zotero on my Mac so I've decided to do a bit of self-help and software testing. I'm pretty disappointed with Bookends' inability to add a book by using the ISBN. I tried numerous and Bookends failed to find any! Zotero on the other hand has smashed every ISBN I've tried including some from the earliest days (1970's) of ISBN's life. Mendeley doesn't play that game at all - from what I can see.

I'm currently adding each of my books into Zotero manually by using the ISBN (not so good where Kindle books are concerned - and I have many!). It's a little time consuming but I hope it will prove worthwhile in the long-run. Once Zotero has all my books listed I will move them into Bookends - or will I? Maybe the journey with Zotero will suffice and i'll learn to like it enough to stay with Zotero and move-away from Bookends. The clock doth tick...... Again, many thanks again for your help.

[Jon]

I assume you are using 13.2.4 -- getting ISBNs was Amazon.com was broken in earlier versions by changes made by Amazon. In 13.2.4 Bookends uses Google Books and a few foreign Amazon sites for finding ISBNs,

A few examples of ISBNs that Bookends doesn't find would be helpful.

Jon
Sonny Software

[nh220]

Thanks for the suggestions - much appreciated. I have Mendeley and Zotero on my Mac so I've decided to do a bit of self-help and software testing. I'm pretty disappointed with Bookends' inability to add a book by using the ISBN. I tried numerous and Bookends failed to find any! Zotero on the other hand has smashed every ISBN I've tried including some from the earliest days (1970's) of ISBN's life. Mendeley doesn't play that game at all - from what I can see.

I'm currently adding each of my books into Zotero manually by using the ISBN (not so good where Kindle books are concerned - and I have many!). It's a little time consuming but I hope it will prove worthwhile in the long-run. Once Zotero has all my books listed I will move them into Bookends - or will I? Maybe the journey with Zotero will suffice and i'll learn to like it enough to stay with Zotero and move-away from Bookends. The clock doth tick...... Again, many thanks again for your help.

I am constantly bopping between Zotero and Bookends myself (I use Zotero mainly for collaborative writing, teaching, and when I need to work on a Windows machine--latter being the main reason) and keeping the two libraries "in sync" is actually not all that bad, so this might be an option for you. I basically use Zotero as a kind of data capture platform, and export to Bookends about once a week to make sure they are in agreement. When it comes to entering PDFs, I do that directly in Bookends. Since I limit my Zotero to pretty standard reference types (Books, Journals, webpages), the export/import process is really easy and does not have any major hiccups--or at least nothing that can't be manually corrected in a few minutes.

FWIW, the main reasons I use Bookends over Zotero are that a) Bookends support is to second to none; b) iOS app; c) custom reference types--I work with some funky legal documents from smaller jurisdictions and the custom reference types are a life saver.

If you end up living a dual Zotero/Bookends life (or I suppose just use Zotero) and you have an iPhone, there is a Siri Shortcut that allows you to just scan a book into your Zotero database (https://www.zotero.org/blog/2018/11/). From my few experiments it seems to work really well.

[Jon]

I'm pretty disappointed with Bookends' inability to add a book by using the ISBN. I tried numerous and Bookends failed to find any!

FYI, there is a bug in the current release that prevents Bookends from importing references using ISBNs containing hyphens or spaces, so remove them before using quick add or autofill from Internet. This will of course be fixed in the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software