Viewing Chorusnotes (messages from send/receive) in Excel

[David Wilkinson]

If anyone extensively uses the Notes feature in send/receive and is frustrated by the limited search/filter capability, wants to know how many unresolved notes they still have to work through, or wants to be able to print out notes to refer to, then read on.

 

I was in this position so asked for some suggestions as to what I could do with the ‘chorusnotes’ file (found in C:\ProgramData\SIL\FieldWorks\Projects\PROJECTNAME\Lexicon.fwstub.ChorusNotes). Many thanks to John Hatton who suggested opening it in Excel as an XML table. This works remarkably well, and using the option ‘Format Data: Text to Columns’ on the long reference link with delimiter ‘&’ and then ‘=’, the relevant word for the note can be successfully isolated.

 

This produces a very workable file that can serve as a good reference point, allows filters, more specific searching and the possibility of printing the relevant parts of the spreadsheet. Of course it is only a one-way process and only provides a fixed ‘snapshot’ of the notes at the time you import the file into Excel – any notes that are added later would require you to go through the same process again.

 

Filtering out the notes that are resolved so that you only see unresolved notes is slightly more complicated, but this can be done with an Excel formula that compares the GUID’s of the notes and the column marked as ‘closed’.

 

You may also find that you have references to entries listed in the notes file that no longer exist as entries in your FLEx data, since deleting an entry in FLEx does not delete the relevant chorus note – in fact there is no way to delete one of the notes within FLEx, they can only be marked as resolved. Many thanks to Ken Zook who shared with me multiple different ways to extract all the GUIDs of lexical entries (including using ‘Find all in Current document’ within the fwdata file in Notepad++ and a few regexes, or just a CC table). Once those GUIDs are extracted, another Excel formula can be used to strip out the notes that refer to lexical entries that no longer exist in the FLEx fwdata file.

 

Additionally it’s possible to have a hyperlink in Excel that points direct to the lexical entry in FLEx

 

If anyone is interested in more details then let me know.

 

Hoping this may be of interest to some,

David