Import concordances into spreadsheet on a Mac
Robert Fuchs
very often, I feel the need to export concordances from AntConc and
import them into a spreadsheet to sort out those that really interest me
or refine my results in some other way. This always worked fine on my
Windows machine with OpenOffice Calc, and I suppose it works just as
well with Excel. As it happens, Macs are popular among my students and
the import process gives very weird results there. Neither OO Calc nor
Excel seem to recognise that the file including the concordances is a
CSV file (tried .txt and .csv as file ending). Under Windows (using
Calc), a CSV import window would pop up and you can choose tab as a
delimiter. Nothing of the sort happens on a Mac. Four or five people had
this problem.
If it works at all then the results are not arranged in columns and
there are line breaks that are probably there in the corpus but that
would normally not be part of the concordancing results. But usually
OpenOffice and MS Office open the file as a text file and show it in
Writer/Word.
Has anybody faced similar problems or can recommend ways that might make
this work on a Mac?
Thanks,
Robert
Laurence Anthony
I haven't heard of this problem before. However, all the results of AntConc are saved not in the CSV (comma separated values) format but really TSV (tab separated values) format regardless of which OS the software is run on. Getting these files to open correctly in a spreadsheet program can be problematic. I just tried with Excel on Windows with no luck. However, if you open the results file in the default operating system text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows) and copy the contents to the clipboard, you can then simply paste the results into a new open spreadsheet software file and and the columns will be formatted correctly. This works perfectly for both Excel and Calc on all operating systems.
This would be my recommendation.
Interestingly, if you just rename the results file with the .xls (for Excel) or .ods (for Calc) extension, the file will also open properly with the correct column formatting.
I hope that helps.
Laurence.
Laurence Anthony
I forget to mention in my earlier email that the easiest way to get results from AntConc into a spreadsheet program is to simply copy and paste the results directly.
For example, in the Word List tool, after generating the word list, simply select the columns (e.g., using the Shortcut ALT A), copy the contents (using CTRL C), and then paste them into Excel or Calc (using CTRL V).
This avoids having to use the results file altogether.
I hope this helps!
Laurence.
Robert Fuchs
thank you so much for your suggestions. I don't have a Mac at my
disposal and had to wait for my students to try this out, hence the
delay. I had no idea this was such a big issue. It always worked
perfectly fine for me except for one corpus.
It appears that not all the three options you described worked for all
Mac users. Common problems were that line breaks, which were probably
there in the corpus, also turned up in the spreadsheet. What was
supposed to be a single concordance line was then spread over several
(incidentally, this is also the only issue that I ever had on Windows/OO
Calc). Another problem that some had was that the tabs were no
recognised as delimiters; When using OO Calc, the little window where
you can tell Calc which delimiter to use did not appear.
I'm just telling you this in case this feedback will be useful for you.
Eventually, everybody found that one of the options you suggested worked
in such a way that what was supposed to be in one line stayed in it.
Sometimes the tabs were ignored, though, but that just meant the each
line was in a single cell.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Robert
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Laurence Anthony
The nice thing about this Google group is that the messages get fully indexed by Google, so people with similar problems will hopefully be able to find the solutions.
As you probably know, line breaks are represented by different codes on Windows and Macintosh systems. And, when people exchange files between the two systems, this can cause problems for the software. Perhaps the different codes are the cause of the some of the problems.
In AntConc 3.3.0, I'm hoping things will be a bit smoother because the software is running natively on all systems. As a result, standard copy/paste functions might also work better than before.
Laurence.