Tonight we're going to be looking at a important topic and that is how to import all of my data into Obsidian in the easiest and most efficient way possible.

For many of us cut and pasting or copy and pasting is you know the method we've all begun with but some of us get sick and tired of doing that and we've sort of started exploring other methods and means over the years of how to get the data in more efficiently.

I've done so much so that you know I'm basically working in a data analytical role these days.

It's a skill set guys and once you've learned it it can be really beneficial to your to your common work jobs and things like that.

So anyway what we're going to be doing is we've been looking at Filings fantastic JSON CSV import tool.

It is just called the JSON CSV import tool inside of it but you know it's fantastic and filings amazing so let's just rename it.

All right without further ado let's jump over and have a look.

All right so in front of me you can see I've got the Demo Vault 2 going on.

Got all sorts of things going in here that we've been testing over there the last couple months and what we're gonna do is just go through the process of getting this thing installed.

So come down here to settings we're gonna come in here to community plugins we're gonna go browse and we're gonna do a search for import.

So JSON CSV importer you can tell you've got the right one because it's got filing 42 in it.

Filings obviously the guy we want to really be working with he's been supporting the Realmworks community for years and supporting the Obsidian communities we've moved over to this tool as well.

It was very quick to put this in.

Obviously with everything go through and click install.

Once it's installed click enable and while you're down here and have a look at the readme file.

Now I do want to point out that there's something really cool in here that you can have a look.

So handlebars.js.com slash guide.

I highly recommend you give this a look.

All right and we can see here that basically what we've got is a list of basic, I guess you'd say some templates and readme files on how to use those templates.

But basically handlebar is a template format that's used by other sort of programs in order to import data and what it's going to do is it's going to give you instructions on how to import data and I'm going to show you the very basics of how to use this application.

All right let it be known that there is more advanced stuff inside of these readmes and if you're doing a lot of this you probably want to sit learn and understand exactly what this thing can do.

I highly recommend it.

All right but we're not going to be going into the depths of that today.

I've installed it, I've enabled it, fantastic.

Come back down here to my demo vault and the first thing I need to do is really sort of set up a folder where I want all this stuff to go.

So I'm going to go import test is my folder.

I want everything to come into here.

All right the next thing I need is a source file.

So what I've done is I've just gone onto the internet, done a random Google for a table.

This one came from Google Sheets.

Someone's shared basically a list of tables on spell items and magic items and stuff, the prices and the rarity of them.

All right I'm just using this as an example guys you could do any combination of data that you want.

All right if you can find the data out there in an Excel spreadsheet or copy your data into an Excel spreadsheet go for your life.

And I want you know you know just to make you think outside the box like if you can find a spreadsheet of monsters then effectively you could import entire monsters with this thing.

So what I've done is I've found my table online, I've copied it into an Excel and I've saved it as a .CSV file.

Now that's very important .CSV files don't have any formatting.

You can see I've copied the but if I was to basically now open that thing now that I've saved it again it should drop everything off.

All right so let's just try that let's just go close and we'll go Excel and we're gonna try and break this thing.

We'll reopen book 2.

All right there we go.

So .CSV files don't have any formatting it is literally just text you can open them up into a notepad you can see the format of things that are going on but the really important things to take away is this top row here.

All right because these are our column names and we need to make sure that we know what these are.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick that over to the side just so I can keep looking at it.

I've got some other stuff going on here we'll close that down.

So yeah I've got an Excel spreadsheet all right and now we need to create something called a handlebar file.

Now the good thing about a handlebar file is that they are incredibly simple.

I've got one here that I've made already so I'm going to show you what it looks like.

It's a note all right so all I've done is create a note I've named it something in this case I've called it my handlebar template for magic items and I've written my note all right I've just written it like I would normally so I put my tags in here I put my name all right but you see the thing that starts to stand out is this here.

All right if I bring this back you'll see that what I've done here is in these see inside these curly brackets I've basically gone through and replicated the name of the columns that I want to import.

So I'm going to copy the name of here into there the name again into here the price into there the rarity into there.

Now just as an example to show you know just how flexible this thing is I've gone and made a table all right where I've just copied it through again so you can certainly do that as well.

All right so all you have to do is go curly bracket curly bracket the name of the column and curly bracket and curly bracket and you're done that's it all right that's very simple right if you have a hundred columns in your Excel spreadsheet you could map all hundred of them you could format this however you want you could bold the headings italics lay it out you could probably add let's just try this right import oh it's been a while call out here we go read aloud this is my text I have this name in my bag just as an example right just to show that it can be done all right that's a handlebar file that's that's that's it there's nothing really much that much to it you basically just creating a file or a note inside of obsidian that tells you where you want to import those items when they come from your your spreadsheet and with that we then come over here to the JSON CSV importer icon which will be down your left-hand side here choose JSV CSV file so we're gonna go choose file and I'm going to use the the book 2.CSV that I saved before choose template file so this is my handlebar file that I just created so I know that that's in my vault so we're gonna go to obsidian demo vault 2 it's in where is it templates it's a markdown and it is my handlebar magic items all right so that's now selected field to use as a note name all right so I want my files to be named according to well in this case here what I'm going to use is I'm going to use the magic item that's fine and which folder do I want to put it in I'm gonna put it into the import test all right now just to show you just how cool this thing is right like import test right now is empty there is nothing in here now we come back to here I can't do this again I take long if I can't remember where I put everything okay I'm ready set go boom import finished okay so what is it done let's go and have a look it's not empty anymore all right what it's done it's just imported and created a new note for every single one of these interestingly I've actually got more have I oh no it's just it's okay it's we can come in here and have a look we've got the the tag that we put in we've got the name came in the price the rarity the table populated and the call-out box worked all right now you can see it's created one note for every single line in my table and you can see instantly how useful that can be right you just have to go and I don't know let's say well can you find an NPC spreadsheet online for example pretty sure there's actually a reddit out there of D&D DMs who've been collecting NPCs for a while there's thousands of them technically you can import the whole thing or if you could find like an SRD file that contains all the monsters or all the spells you can import all that all right simples so yeah that is a that's filing CSV JSON importer again this is just a simple demo of how the functionality works just to get your head sort of in the mindset of thinking about what you could do with this thing it does work on JSON JSON files which means technically if you were playing with fifth edition monsters you could do the import from there as well I will say though that JSON is more complex than CSV JSON tends to have nested data elements and what I mean by that is there's usually a parent item and then underneath the parent there might be different items so for example there might be a parent variable called attributes and then inside the attributes you won't find another variable called strength and dexterity and constitution so when that happens you're gonna need to sort of jump into that readme file and really sort of go through and find out how you can access the sub layers of that I've played around with it I managed to get it working I haven't got it working completely accurately to what I wanted so I stopped playing with it but I found some other ways to do what I wanted to need to do myself but yeah obviously if you're you're playing with bulk data or you know this is a it's not not really that technical so for those of you who aren't data analysts or don't understand SQL or don't want to dive into KNIME or Alteryx or something like that you know this is a really fantastic option so yeah anyway guys I hope that's a big useful for you hope it helps obviously get your your data into the tool in a much more efficient way and yeah we'll see what you guys can do with it so outside of that I'll speak to you guys on the forums have a great day