Allow a Spreadsheet upload to Memories
I saw the previous post about the need to convert a spreadsheet to a pdf in order to be able to upload it.
Being able to share a research log spreadsheet, full of info and sources that has many more columns than a landscape-oriented pdf would hold, would be SO valuable. I could share my entire research log with source citations, source links, all data transcriptions & translations. It would save me hours of having to type source info into fields in the FS sources tab, and would be a quick and easy way to receive, read, & navigate all that info from someone else.
I would imagine that the concerns are:
- malevolent macros or fomulas
- offensive content
Are these the only concerns? Is there a way to strip a spreadsheet of its macros, and scan for offensive stuff?
Please consider making a way that we can upload a spreadsheet either into sources or memories.
Warm regards
Answers
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You can strip spreadsheets of their macros (or rather, you can recreate the spreadsheet programmatically without adding the macro data).
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I am a bit doubtful about this, for four reasons:
1.A sourcing structure that is not reflected on the profile or relationship Sources, or only present as a Memory Source, is not available in normal ways to other users, the record hinting system, Profile Quality Scoring, etc. (Perhaps some sort of profile level source list import mechanism might be a possibility?)
2.In my (extensive and painful) experience, the structure of any spreadsheet tends to be clearer to the creator than to others, so you might well end up with a lot of support request messages.
3.Spreadsheets by their nature are editable. People would open them and, I suspect, expect to be able to make modifications and save them into the Memory, which I can't see being either supported or advisable. (You probably wouldn't be able to edit the content yourself, either.)
4.A lot of people would be nervous of downloading a spreadsheet from the Internet, even if FS were able and prepared to 'certify' it in some way as safe. (I'm personally not sure it's a good idea to encourage the downloading of spreadsheets, full stop, but others may well disagree.)
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I agree with @MandyShaw1 that spreadsheets are Fraught, but point 1 doesn't make any sense to me. I create and attach unindexed (i.e., not machine-parseable) sources All The Time. I don't believe that the lack of machine-interpretable fields reduces the value of a source, and in fact, I would rather have the image than the index any day. The index is supposed to exist so that I can find the image, not the other way around.
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That's not what I meant @Julia Szent-Györgyi, all I am really saying is that a source stored only within a spreadsheet on Memories is not sufficiently available to those users who expect to find the profile's Sources information on the Sources tab and/or among relationship sources. It doesn't need to be machine-interpretable in any way, but it does need to be visible (as yours are).
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