One of the biggest things standing in the way of a person or organization using LIDA is how daunted they feel at the prospect of typing all their library’s listings into the system.

Two people I corresponded with today told me they have 7,000 and 20,000 titles in their music libraries. Yipes – that could be a LOT of typing.

Well, we have good news and medium-good news and maybe not-so-good news.

The good news is that if you are already keeping your music library’s information in another format, such as in an Excel or Google spreadsheet, it should be fairly straightforward to import your information into LIDA.

We are currently putting together a tutorial on how to do just that.

The medium-good news is that the ease of this operation depends entirely on what format your data is in, and how well you have kept it organized up to now.

For example, two days ago, I converted someone’s file of about 4,999 listings and imported them into LIDA, and it took me just under half an hour. That’s sure a lot quicker than having to type in nearly 5,000 records.

However, that same someone had another file of about 1,800 records to import, and this file was a total mess. I could probably have written a routine to analyze every piece of information in those records, and trim it up properly and then place it into the right place in LIDA, but that would have taken several hours of programming, and it became questionable whether it might be more efficient to simply type in those 1,800 records.

Some of the other medium-good news is that while you CAN import your data on your own, you must be reasonably comfortable manipulating a spreadsheet, and you must have a full version of Microsoft Access.

This is not as big a drawback as it might seem, as Access comes with Microsoft Office Professional and Office Pro 365 subscriptions.

 ASIDE: I am a subcriber to Microsoft Office Pro 365 (Family plan) for three reasons. First, for $99 a year (as I write this), it gives me the latest versions of all the Microsoft Office software, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Publisher, and … ACCESS. Second, for that same price, I also get a full terabyte of cloud storage. And finally, at no additional charge, up to FIVE of my family members get the same thing! For me, it’s the best deal I’ve found recently

If you have Excel and Access and can follow instructions, AND your data is in decent shape, then you should be able to do your own data import without too much trouble, and you can save yourself a ton of typing.

The maybe not-as-good news is that even if you don’t have Excel/Access or if you consider yourself a total computer dolt, you’re still not stuck typing. We (the LIDA developers) are prepared to offer our services to import your data for you. Unfortunately, we cannot do this for free, as much as we’d like to, but it will be reasonable, and the price will depend totally on what shape your data is in. Curiously, the price for doing this will have very little to do with the quantity of listings you have; once the procedure is set up, there is very little difference in importing 400 listings or 23,000 listings.

So this is where we are right now with making LIDA accessible to everyone – thinking about how to make getting your own data into LIDA as painless as possible.

Do you have thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below.