Generating a complete TiddlyWiki from Excel

[Paul Richardson]

Good afternoon, complete beginner here.

I maintain a reference document for my organisation which has some pre-amble and then is essentially a large table. The user looks through the table for their particular area of interest and then is given a particular category/label for their information. The document is also shared with partner organisations and suppliers and needs to be presented in a portable format - and it cannot be shared on the internet or in a collaborative manner. The document has three levels e.g. section 1, section 1.1, section 1.1.1 (although in some places 1.1.1.1).

As the document is quite wordy (with footnotes) it is currently maintained in Word, but I would like to move away from this, and have been playing with TiddlyWiki. As I still need to provide the Word version, what I would quite like to do is have a master database (probably in Excel) which then auto-populates the Word document and the TiddlyWiki version. 

I am familiar with the principles of markup laguage and I have managed to get as far as getting Excel to generate the code for the table rows, and have successfully pasted these into a tiddler manually. 

|4.1|Wordy description of situation A| <div class="cell class4">class4</div> | <div class="cell class4">class4</div> | <div class="cell class2">class2</div> |
|4.11|Wordy description of situation B| <div class="cell class3">class3</div> | <div class="cell class3">class3</div> | <div class="cell class1">class1</div> |

However I then wanted to get Excel to generate the code for the whole tiddler itself, (the <div created modified tages title>), but when I paste the complete tiddler (<div> header and the content and the </div> closing) into the HTML directly (just after the tiddlers I created in tiddlywiki), this doesn't seem to work. It looks identical in format to other tiddlers I have added in the usual manner, so there must be other parts of the HTML I need to edit.. (I can see my tiddlers both in the "static" area and in one other place and have added equivalent entries in both).

<div created="20190812141646000" modified="20190812141646000" tags="" title="Description">
|4.1|Wordy description of situation A| <div class="cell class4">class4</div> | <div class="cell class4">class4</div> | <div class="cell class2">class2</div> |
|4.11|Wordy description of situation B| <div class="cell class3">class3</div> | <div class="cell class3">class3</div> | <div class="cell class1">class1</div> |
</div>

I know the HTML isn't intended to be directly edited but what can I say!

So my immediate question is, which parts of the HTML file do I need to insert code into in order to add a working tiddler? 

My other question is - is my objective even possible or will there be too many other unseen hurdles and complications along the way? 

(I suppose the alternative approach is to maintain the master version in TiddlyWiki and then find a way of exporting the whole document to Word, but it needs to be clean and professional).

Thank you!

[Michael Wiktowy]

Hi Paul,

Hot off the press is version 5.1.20 which has some math and string manipulation functionality (specifically split and join) that might make importing and exporting CSV files viable in your use-case. Nothing will be super-automagic but tools should be there out of the box and you might find a good workflow that has your records stored as tiddlers and sections structured as hierarchical tags (see how table of contents work). I believe that there are some more advanced plug-ins that handle import and export of Excel docs that you might be able to use without building the tools yourself.

Also I have has some experience/pain dealing with x.x.x.x type section numbering and the "sortan" filter seems to order those correctly.

Footnotes might be problematic (something that I have been struggling with) since html doesn't have a fixed concept of page and printing and pagination control is a bit sketchy from browsers. Endnotes would be simpler alternative.

Good luck,

/Mike

On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 9:53:49 AM UTC-3, Paul Richardson wrote:

Good afternoon, complete beginner here.

I maintain a reference document for my organisation which has some pre-amble and then is essentially a large table. The user looks through the table for their particular area of interest and then is given a particular category/label for their information. The document is also shared with partner ogranisations and suppliers and needs to be presented in a portable format - and it cannot be shared on the internet or in a collaborative manner. The document has three levels e.g. section 1, section 1.1, section 1.1.1 (although in some places 1.1.1.1).

As the document is quite wordy (with footnotes) it is currently maintained in Word, but I would like to move away from this, and have been playing with TiddlyWiki. As I still need to provide the Word version, what I would quite like to do is have a master database (probably in Excel) which then auto-populates the Word document and the TiddlyWiki version. 

I am familiar with the principles of markup laguage and I have managed to get as far as getting Excel to generate the code for the table rows, and have successfully pasted these into a tiddler. However I then wanted to get Excel to generate the code for the tiddler itself, (the <div created modified tages title> but when I paste this into the HTML directly (just after the tiddlers I created in tiddlywiki), this doesn't seem to work (and yes I have closed the </div> at the end).

[Paul Richardson]

Thank you - I hadn't thought of pulling into tiddlywiki I have just been trying to push. I also didn't know it was possible to import.

I might be able to have a two-step process - export from Excel into an intermediate format which then gets imported into TiddlyWiki.

Thanks again,

Paul

[PMario]

Hi Paul,

This may be of interest: https://tiddlywiki.com/editions/xlsx-utils/

-m

[Paul Richardson]

Many thanks - I will have a look!

[Cade Roux]

As far as the concept of push, you can do that.  I am currently using the nodejs command line to import tiddlers into TiddyWiki and then generate the single file:

tiddlywiki MyWiki --verbose --import tiddlers.json application/json --build index

My database is generating the json containing all the tiddlers

Cade

[TonyM]

Paul,

Depending on the structure of the data in your excel it may be as simple as generating a csv file and importing that.

Personally I would use TiddlyWiki as the interactive database and generate the documents as needed.

I am working on a project right now to generate multiple documents, for multiple audiences, spreadsheets and PDF documents, from a fairly complex set of data in tiddlywiki. PDF's can be converted to Word and with spreadsheets, that some clients demand, I have a template in which I paste the CSV format output my application generates, then use text to columns. We used to have multiple documents and they all needed visiting, if one small thing changed, now the data is stored in a single file based tiddlywiki hosted on an O365 SharePoint instance.

SharePoint provides the check in and Out functionality to allow serial editing of the single file wiki.

Unlike excel Tiddlywiki provides an easy to design interactive environment with plenty of User interface control. Ultimately I intend to provide a "website" generation (tiddlywiki) with only the data for the different clients, so they can visit and get the latest, with search and filters, stopping the need for distribution, bypassing documents altogether with a user option to print a PDF.

For more sophisticated maths evans formulaue plugin is great but I can avoid this with the new operators.

There are also editable table plugins and more that could help you. 

Regards

Tony

[Paul Richardson]

Thanks for your detailed reply, I'll look into those ideas.

Paul