Batch List Importing – problems

[Jerry Hofmann]

I just opened the Excel file in that app, and saved it as a tab delimited text file and that opened fine as a batch list… might try that?

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO, CD’s

[Steven Gonzales]

Your files are being saved in Rich Text Format, so there’s a bunch of header information that final cut cannot interpret.

Your file #1 has this at the beginning:

“{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf949\cocoasubrtf350
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\paperw11900\paperh16840\margl1440\margr1440\vieww16260\viewh13580\viewkind0
\pard\tx1700\tx3714\tx5895\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural

\f0\fs24 \cf0 \”

File 2 was saved as a “pages” file, 3 was saved as a “numbers” file, 3b was saved as an Excel file, 4 was saved as a “numbers” file, and 4b was saved as an Excel file.

You need to save as tab delimited text file. From excel, do this by File-save as — Text (Tab delimited).

[Aldo Palumbo]

Thank you Jerry and Steven.

These suggestions didn’t work for me, but they did help me find a workaround.
In summary:

tab delimited text files do not work for my set up

cleaner text files do

I think one issue here may be that I don’t have Microsoft Office. I use iWork, which I like a lot for all the classic Apple reasons. As I suspect the number of iWork-FCP users in the world will grow, I’ve uploaded another zip file which contains batch lists that work, batch lists that don’t work, a summary of what I think are the reasons, plus two Automator workflows:

https://homepage.mac.com/aldopalumbo/BatchListImportTest/FileSharing75.html

best

Aldo Palumbo
http://www.aldopalumbo.com

[Steven Gonzales]

Theres Open office and Textwrangler, free text editors that might save you some trouble.

https://download.openoffice.org/index.html
https://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/