Using the Exported Vocab

billglover
March 30, 2008, 09:12 PM posted in General Discussion

I study all my vocab off-line and I know I'm not the only one. For some time now I have been copying the vocab from the pdf transcripts and then importing it into iFlash. We used to be able to download the audio for all the vocabulary but with the change to the new flash player this is no longer as easy to do. But, not to worry, there is an easier way...

It is possible to export all your vocab as XML and helpfully, the XML also contains all your tags and URLs for the mp3s. So this got me thinking, it must be possible to extract a nicely formatted list of vocab and create a folder of the relevant mp3s.

One episode of Top Gear later and I have a couple of scripts which do most of the hard work for me. I have made them available here just in case they are going to be of use to anyone else. Please feel free to download, modify, improve and make suggestions.

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calkins
March 30, 2008, 10:23 PM

This is really nice Bill, thanks for creating and sharing these! I'm gonna see if I can run the script...

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billglover
March 30, 2008, 10:39 PM

I should probably mention that I have tested them on OS X and Linux. There is no reason why they couldn't be modified to work on Windows, but it wouldn't be for the non-techy. My guess is that they rely on some utilities (the XML parser) that probably aren't standard on a Mac. The problem is that I have installed so much stuff I have no idea what is standard and what isn't. If you run into any issues, let me know and I'll see if I can help. Hopefully I'll get some time over the coming week to try and make it a little more user friendly.

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adiiasdadasda
April 03, 2008, 05:18 PM

Hi Guys, I found the way to open the export vocabulary file on microsoft excell 2007 without any problem 1. Export your vocabulary as XML file. 2. Open XML file using Microsoft Excel 2007 3.Small window will pop up: Please select how you would like to open this file: select "As an XML table" 4. Another small window will pop up: The specified XML source does not refer to a schema, Excel will create a schema based on the XML source data: Press "Ok"

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billglover
April 07, 2008, 09:54 PM

This is a quick video showing how I use the scripts I mentioned above. If anyone knows how best to package this up to make it user friendly, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. YouTube isn't great quality so if you are really interested in seeing what's on the screen, here are a couple of links to the original video: Host 1: http://www.filedropper.com/cpodutils Host 2: http://drop.io/rdcpd3q/