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Export options for term bases |
When you export term bases into CSV or tab-separated text files, you might need to set a number of options. This topic explains the most important ones.
After you select the Export to CSV command for a term base, the Term base export settings dialog appears. Here you can control the following:
| · | Encoding: specifies how the characters in the CSV file should be encoded. This is by far the most important option for proper interoperability because you must choose a form of encoding that is supported by the program that will load this CSV file. In most cases, you are safe to choose UTF-8 (a form of Unicode), which is also the default setting for memoQ. |
| · | Delimiter: specifies what character memoQ should use to separate table cells within a row. You can choose the tab character, the comma, the semicolon, or any other character. The safest delimiter to use is the tab character, however, as the name CSV suggests, memoQ’s default delimiter is the comma. |
Note: CSV would suggest that comma is the most common separator character. However, some programs such as spreadsheets automatically use commas or semicolons according to the regional settings in Windows – so you cannot always be sure which one is used in a file you are just saving from, for example, Microsoft Excel.
| · | Write field headers in first row: You can instruct memoQ to write the column headers — the field names — in the first line of the text file. This might be important because some tools like memoQ itself can read and use the field name to determine how to import a table column. |
| · | Choose fields: A term base entry can have lots of properties as described in the Structure of entries in a term base topic. In memoQ, there is a fixed set of properties, and the names of those properties are also fixed. By default, memoQ will export all possible properties in the CSV or text file, no matter whether or not they have a value in the entry (or the term base, for that matter). So a CSV file exported using default settings will contain a large number of empty table cells. Before exporting your term base in a CSV file, however, you can choose which fields to export. |
Important: If you export a term base using the default settings, you will be able to import it into another copy of memoQ without changing the default import options.
See also