Importing from CSV

TimeStory can import data from comma-separated value (CSV) files, allowing you to quickly bring in events from many project-planning tools, calendars, spreadsheets, and other sources.

Configuring Your Import

To get started, create a new document (or open a document to which you wish to add the events) and choose File > Import from CSV. This will let you choose an existing CSV file. After opening the file, TimeStory will show you up to 100 rows from the file, and let you configure how you want to import it.

• The “Field separator” option will normally be a comma, but you can change it to a tab. (Such files are, naturally, known as tab-separated value or TSV files.)
• If the first row in the table contains the column titles, check the “First row contains column titles” checkbox. (This makes it easier to pick columns for each field, and prevents that row from being treated as an event.)
• Each row in the table will map to at most one event. By default, any rows which can’t be converted to events will just be skipped, in case you have extra rows in your table; you can change that by choosing a different policy next to “In case of error”.
• You must tell TimeStory which column of the table to use for each event’s date and title. (These may be the same column, if you just want to name each event after its date.) See below for the format of dates
• For span events, you can also pick a column to contain their end dates. Any event without an end date will be imported as a point event. See below for more details.
• If applicable, pick the column containing each event’s section title. During import, events will be assigned to the section with the corresponding title; if one cannot be found, a new section will be created.
• By default, each event will be placed in a separate row, at the end of its assigned section (or at the end of the document, if no sections are present). Use the “Create new events” drop-down if you wish to switch this behavior and put all events on the same row.

Validating the Configuration

You can press the Validate button to ask TimeStory to attempt to read the entire CSV according to your current settings, without importing anything yet. It will tell you how many valid events it found, and how many rows it had to skip because it could not extract a valid event.

Performing the Import

When you’re ready, press Import. The events will be imported and added to your document, and they will all be selected, so that you can easily adjust styling or position.

TimeStory can import quite large CSV files, containing tens of thousands of events. A large import or validation may take several seconds; as it runs, the dialog will continue to update the number of events found and the number of unusable rows it had to skip, and you can choose to stop at any time.

You can Undo and Redo a CSV import, just like any other document editing action.

About Date Values

Your CSV must contain at least one date column. Dates can be specified in different ways, described below. (Note that, for most purposes, you can just ignore this section, and save dates to your CSV files in a natural way, and the right thing should happen.)

• Using a common localized, system-dependent date format. For example, in the US, this might be “1/2/19” to represent January 2, 2019; in other regions and languages, that same string might refer to February 1. Note that each region tends to support a variety of formats, using spelled-out or abbreviated month names, omitted years, etc.
• Using a fixed date format of the form YYYY-MM-DD (that is, a four-digit year, a two-digit month number, and a two-digit day of month, in that order, separated by dash characters, and nothing else). This format will work no matter what your computer’s region and language settings are. This is provided because many external tools and programs will produce dates in this format, avoiding any ambiguity.

If your CSV contains an End Date column, each row’s value for that column may be any of the following:

• An empty string (empty cell, in the spreadsheet), to create a Point event with only one date;
• A date, using either of the above formats, to create a Span event whose last day is the given date, as if you entered that date into the End Date field on the Inspector; or
• A date prefixed by the “<” character (the less-than symbol), indicating that the span event ends before the given date. This is provided because many other tools and programs consider the “end” of an event to be the day after it completes, not its last day.