I am about to enter a lot of data into Excel that I will later import to Gramps and have been thinking about how the .csv import could be improved to render it less complex while also enabling more details to be entered.
At the moment, Gramps only supports one occupation / residence per person. If I want to import more than one, then I need to start a new table with a person column and the occupation / residence columns. Would it be possible to allow more than one occupation and residence to imported? This could be done by e.g. allowing users to add numbers at the end of the occupation / residence column headers (e.g. occupationdescr1, occupationdate1, occupationdescr2, occupationdate2) to differentiate between different events.
If you want to add a personās parents, you need to create separate tables for Marriage and Family first. Why not allow husband/father/parent1, wife/mother/parent2 in the People table and automatically create families based on that? Similarly, a column for spouse/husband/wife would make it easier to connect couples with each other. As long as you avoid duplication, this would make it easier to index e.g. BMD records.
Why go to the work of putting the data into a spreadsheet when there is much more functionality by entering right into gramps? Just asking because I may not understand your workflow.
Because entry for repetitive data in a Spreadsheet is blazingly fast, mouse-free, intuitive, and easy. (Until you get to the āsave as CSVā and Import that file into Gramps. Thatās where the āeasy and intuitiveā breaks down.) see CSV template for Text Import
A spreadsheet lets you be certain that ALL the family members queued up in a single place without spawning layer-upon-layer of popup dialogs.
If you do the 3 generation data-entry test (that @ed4becky does in his Genealogy Showcase video) in the Gramps interface, thatās 3 Families (plus 3 marriage Events and 3 children relationship-to-parents), 7 persons (plus 14 events: birth, death) plus 17 Places. That would be 47 dialogs!
And possibly nearly double that if you choose citations for all of those.
But I can fill in that information in less than 5 minutes in a spreadsheetā¦ including a sole source for them all.
In the spreadsheet below, all that a person needs to fill in are the Yellow fields. The light green (Places) are helpful
with a gedcom import in Gramps. But unfortunately not the witness import.
Perhaps when the Forms Gramplet update comes out it will be possible to read Excel tables.
Entering large Datas is definitely faster and more intuitive with an Excel sheet than with Gramps. In Gramps you have to make too many clicks to enter data.
Before adding alternate methods of doing the same thing, some basic deficiencies seem more important.
Those absolutely should also be addressed. The .csv import should enable users to enter the whole breadth of information types and associations that Gramps supports.
Why go to the work of putting the data into a spreadsheet when there is much more functionality by entering right into gramps?
As said by others, clicking and scrolling through several dialogues when I could just press TAB in Excel a few times requires significantly more effort. It makes sense to make the effort when you are growing an existing family tree organically, but not when you are simply trying to create a database at the highest speed possible.
