Hi! We're trying something new in this article. This is the text transcription from our video, in case you prefer to read it! :)
Video Transcription
PowerNotes
In this video, we're going to show you how you can import your PowerNotes highlights into NoteDex. So, for those of you who may not be familiar with PowerNotes, it's one of those sort of highlighting tools that you can use in your web browser. And so, for example, we have this webpage with our favorite topic of black holes.
And if I just start to highlight some of the text, we get a nice overlay from PowerNotes with the different topics that I'm collecting information on. And so, I'll click on space research. Obviously. And of course, then here we can also put in a note and I'll say this is about Einstein theory, okay? For those of you who want to learn more, I think you just go to powernotes.com and there'll be plenty of information there. But you can also just go and look for the PowerNotes extension. Okay?
Export from PowerNotes
But in this video, we're just going to go straight into how you actually get your information from PowerNotes and into NoteDex. So, we go to the PowerNotes website and I've logged into my account and let me just sort of refresh because I did one new highlight, and we're going to see here, as you can see, all of the different space research highlights that I've collected in PowerNotes, including the last one that I included here. So, in order to export from PowerNotes, we just click the export icon. And in this case, I recommend doing Excel and the source report format. That's going to generate an Excel file. And I'm on Windows, so it appears in my browser downloads folder. And then we're going to open that file. It opens up Excel by default.
Prepare Data
So as you can see, it's opened up and we have a number of different columns from PowerNotes. Now, one of the things that I know is that this source column is actually a hyperlink. So you can see here, when I move over it, it's actually a link, and this is a title to the web page. So what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to kind of make that easier to handle and I'm just going to copy everything, but this time I'm just going to paste special and paste just the text values of the cells itself. So now what we'll find is when I move over it, it's the true text rather than being a hyperlink. I know that's a little bit advanced, but it makes it easier. And then I'm going to now actually delete that column away. So I'm also going to rename this Title because this is going to be the title of our card. I don't have any citations, but I'm going to keep that field and Space Research I'm going to use as a Tag and key language, that's going to be the front of the card. This is actually going to be the text that we're going to include on the front of the card. And I'm going to move that to position two. And then I'm going to include a column here, which is the back. Well, actually my Notes are going to be the back. So let me just move that over and I'll call that Back and then include another column here for Group.
Okay, so you can see here we've got the PowerNotes Excel spreadsheet now formatted with the title of the card, the front text in my card, the back, which has got a few of my notes, no Group at this moment, and Space Research Tag. So I'm going to save that file. And then I'm also going to now just save it properly as a CSV file, which is what we need. And we're going to do PowerNotes import. So now that it's saved as a CSV file. Now, one of the things that you might be wondering is, well, hold on a minute there. Looks like in your actual text there's commas and other things! Like here, for instance. How are we going to handle that? Well, there's a special case, and this is how Excel really helps us, is that in Microsoft Excel, it's actually encapsulated inside of these quotes " ". And if you have your text inside quotes, then it won't break up to your CSV file at the comma and NoteDex that can handle that! So stay tuned...!
Import PowerNotes Highlights into NoteDex
Let's switch over into a browser window and let me create a new stack for the demonstration. Right, so we've created a new stack and I'm going to import that file into NoteDex. Now, here's the file, the comma separated file, and you can double check that by checking. Here we go. And open that up. And as you can see, NoteDex has handled the text with commas correctly! And as we mentioned, it's actually incorporated inside quotes. We've got the back text, the group and the tag. So if you use Excel when you save a CSV, it will put the quotes appropriately for you if your text has commas in it, and NoteDex can handle that. So now all that remains is to create the cards. As you know, there's quite a few cards. I wouldn't do generate thumbnails. In this case, we've only got a couple. So I'm going to generate thumbnails and I'll go, yes. And in about 10 seconds, this will be imported along with the thumbnail images that will have been created. And then when that's finished, we can then go back and see the cards. And there you go. So now let's go back and we can see the card shave been created and the text is inside the cards. Now you can continue to edit all of your PowerNotes cards inside of NoteDex.
We hope you enjoy this video and we look forward to hearing how you're importing all your great PowerNotes highlights to NoteDex!
Thanks very much.