Using CSV and your Spreadsheet to edit translations

A CSV (Comma Seperated Value) file is one in which each field or cell is seperated by a comma (or another character) and each record or line is seperated by a newline.

When using CSV files generated by po2csv you will find the data as follows:

Preserve filenames, do not change the case of the filename. Return files in a ZIP archive in the same order and directory structure. This is important because the reverse process, coverting CSV to PO is made easier if you do not change these.

When opening a CSV file you will be presented with a number of questions. Here are the answers you should provide:

There is a problem with OpenOffice.org 1.1.x in that it does not read CSV file correctly. Use OpenOffice.org 2.0 instead.

1. In the text import dialog. Ensure that the character set in 'Unicode UTF-8'. Under 'Separator options' ensure that the 'Separated by' radio button is selected and the 'Comma' is checked. The text delimeter should be ” (double quotes).
2. Check to see that the import wizard has identified the 3 columns correctly
3. Click OK

There is a problem with Microsoft Excel 97 and 2000 in that it opens a UTF-8 file as if it is ASCII. Excel does save CSV files correctly, if the encoding of the opened file is retained, but Excel by default does not retain the encoding. Some success has been had using XSLGEN (edit the xslgen.bat file to reflect the location of your installation of Excel) to open UTF-8 CSV files correctly in Excel.

Initialy the first column will stretch across the page as it contains a large amount of data, but you cannot see or work with this data. Therefore do the following:

1. Adjust the column widths - 5” works well as you can then see both the original and translation clearly.
2. Adjust the cell formating for the first column to allow the insertion of automatic line breaks (this will cause the data to wrap within the column and make it all readable) this also allows for automatic hyphenation which will then hyphenate long words. The result of this step is that you can now read all data in column one as the rows will become larger to accomodate this information.
3. You can repeat this process for other columns but then messages will wrap differently to how they appear in the translation. Do this only if you really don't have space or otherwise look at text shrinking options.

Each Spreadsheet application will achive the above in a slightly different way. Here are specific instructions.

There is a problem with OpenOffice.org 1.1.x in that it does not read CSV file correctly. Use OpenOffice.org 2.0 instead.

1. Right click on the header of Column A. Select “Column Width”. Type in a value in the “Width” field.
2. Right click on the header of Column A. Select “Format Cells…”, then select the “Alignment” tab. Now under Properties enable “Wrap text automatically” and “Hyphenation active”.
3. If you can't see column B or C clearly. Select the header of the column. Select “Format Cells…”, then select the “Alignment” tab. Now under Properties disable “Wrap text automatically” and enable “Shrink to fit cell size”