Have you worked hard on maintaining your lists of repertoire in electronic format and now you want to bring those in to Velvet Singer?
It is simple:
- 1. Go to Repertoire module
- 2. File menu / Import Records / File…
- 3. Select an Excel file to import
- 4. Match the fields
- 5. Check “perform auto-enter”
I absolutely love that people are thinking about this. That means that they really get how powerful it is to have everything gathered together in one spot, and want to come up with cool ways to make it all as easy as possible.
If you would like, you can download and use this Repertoire Import Excel Template that I whipped up. It has five columns of data: Title, Work, Role, Composer and Language. You can also create or modify your own Excel to contain that basic information.
The Details
Here are some more details for those that would like to play at home:
1. Go to Repertoire module
You will be importing data into the Repertoire module, so it is imperative that you navigate to any Repertoire layout before triggering the import. It will become obvious as you get to the field matching screen if your target is anything other than Repertoire.
You can import into the Detail or the List Repertoire layout, there is no difference.
2. File menu / Import Records / File…
From the menu drop down, select to import records from a File. You’ll notice that you can actually import from a variety of sources. Another popular option is the tab-delimited source. That works just fine too.
3. Select an Excel file to import
Of course, before you import the Excel file with your data, you may want to do a little clean up work. For example, Composers in VS are only last name (except in the case of duplicate last names such as J. Strauss). Also, you may not have inputted information into all five suggested fields (Title, Work, Role, Composer, Language), such as the Language field. In this case, you can either do data entry in Excel before the import or in VS after the import. Whichever you prefer.
4. Match the fields
There are a variety of ways that you can match the fields in the source (Excel) to those of the destination (VS). If you have your columns labeled in Excel exactly matching the field names in VS, then you can first:
- a) check the box “Don’t import first record (contains field names),” then
b) arrange by Matching Fields.
Otherwise, you can manually align the data on the left with the fields on the right. Do not worry about leaving fields blank, especially such as field names that you do not recognize such as z_recCreateAccountName. These are developer fields and will fill in automatically.
5. Check “perform auto-enter”
Important: You must check this box as you click Import. The system will assign each of the new Repertoire records a unique ID. Without this ID, your Repertoire will not be able to “relate” to other data such as your Journal or Auditions. They would be entirely anti-social, which is not the spirit of Velvet!
Lastly, you will want to scroll through each record and manually input the Category and Type within Velvet Singer.
Thank you for your curiosity and enthusiasm for this feature!
