GlossaryConverter

Spreadsheets can’t properly support synonyms and homonyms; there’s a reason why termbases are used… Glossary Converter implements a custom way of storing synonyms in a table and importing them back into termbases. A complex termbase entry is exported into a row like this, storing one entry instead of one term per row:

You may want the same term multiple times as a synonym, just with different comments (trust me, it happens). You can then just write the term once and it will be duplicated to the same number as you have fields:

The synonym format allows the preservation of synonyms, and also have homonyms. At the same time you do lose some of the features of Excel, like alphabetically browsing terms: in the example, “automobile” would not be found among other terms starting with ‘a’.

If your terms contain the separator character ‘|’, they would be wrongly split into synonyms. In that case, you can specify a different separator in the settings. Any Unicode character (or string) will do, so there's bound to be something that works with your data.

You can also use a multiline format, with one line per synonym.

If you don't want synonym support at all, you can switch it off in the settings. In that case, only the last synonym of an entry is stored in the spreadsheet; the example would result in this row: 

When switching off synonyms and importing a spreadsheet that was exported with synonyms, the terms wont be split. E.g., you'd get “car|automobile” as one term.

This isn't a the easiest area of conversion. If you have workflows that require different table formats for synonyms, please contact glossary@cerebus.de and I'll see if I can implement it in future versions.

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Easily create iPhone documentation