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[ferday]

well JimH asked, so here goes...

we are all (those of us that have to do occasional office work anyways) using MC whilst working to listen to music.  So if MC is open already, and it has so much power in the database and metadata, it would be lovely to have it work better in an office situation.  
for background, my use case is project management.  i am not tied to a corporate system (my own company) like workbench or access.  MC has already changed the way i do things for the better in many ways and i even use it for scheduling!  by leveraging database metadata, the RMC, and search, i can get to stuff much easier than using explorer by drilling through metadata.  for a single project (i may have 5 or 6 going on at once) i can get thousands of files (mostly photos with some reports [documents]) every day from my employees.  

what would make it a truly great office product for me (that i think isn't hard to implement, but what do i know)?

1. metadata - leverage files that can use internal metadata (.pdf and most MS Office can do limited in-file) and use sidecars otherwise for ANY file type.  the MC database metadata is lifesaving but would be nice to have it external
2. file type - for MC Windows, we should be able to use ANY "common" data file (for example the same list as if you save as...in Word or Excel is a good start for windows) without having to modify the .ini file in the MC directory
3. Cover art support - obviously i'm not going to scrape for documents but being able to assign a cover to a project would be huge for browsing files
4. better "automatic" launching of external program, it works ok but sometimes doesn't...i wish i had more info about why (but i think it's because of little things like xls, xlsx, xlsm, csv...all using the same external launch but i haven't got all of it in the .ini).  i end up using the locate (external) a lot to get to the file

the object is to be able to not have to use explorer to create subfolders etc. but just mass place the data into a single folder on the PC and use MC to do the heavy lifting and create the project map with ease.  and being able to export a "document playlist" to an excel would be pretty neat.

the future - JRemote - this is a wishlist dream thing, but if i could go into the client office with nothing but an ipad and go through the project to date by streaming in the files...holy smokes i'd probably increase my business simply through the wow factor (engineers are easily led by cool technologies  

[mwillems]

These are good requests and have a lot of overlap with the other data file thread (you were there too!): https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=103267

Some things have already been improved (cover art handling for data files is much better than it was, if you haven't tried lately, give it a shot). But the play with external program options are still a little wonky, and support for sidecars or in-file metadata storage would be awesome.

So I'll definitely add my +1 here.

[ferday]

thanks mwillems.  i forgot to link that thread.  i didn't want to just bump it as i'm thinking more about office than comic books or ROM's although that said there is a ton of overlap in use case for sure!

[glynor]

I agree wholeheartedly about sidecar support. There are some downsides, of course. If you import your home directory, then there are going to be JRSidecar files strewn everywhere on the filesystem. I can ignore these easily in my media folders (which I basically never look at outside of MC), but it would be more challenging in my personal document folders.

Still, I'd like to be able to enable it if I want to preserve the metadata in case of some kind of catastrophic Library loss, and for interchange with scripts and other applications. I'd like to be able to turn on sidecars for all file types that can't be tagged with embedded tags (selectable at the [Media Type] level would be appropriate, I think).

and being able to export a "document playlist" to an excel would be pretty neat.

You can do this now. I do it at work many times per week.

1. Arrange a View in MC with the Columns of the view set how you'd like it to appear in Excel.
2. Select all.
3. Right-click > Edit Commands > Copy.
4. Open a blank Excel worksheet.
5. Paste.

Done. When you copy the contents of any View (in MC's Standard View) to the clipboard, it copies the contents of the view in CSV format (including a column header row), which can be pasted into any application that can read CSV data.

[glynor]

4. better "automatic" launching of external program, it works ok but sometimes doesn't...i wish i had more info about why (but i think it's because of little things like xls, xlsx, xlsm, csv...all using the same external launch but i haven't got all of it in the .ini).  i end up using the locate (external) a lot to get to the file

I don't have this trouble. Could you explain further?

I can import any file type into MC. It automatically supports most of the common office file types, but they're fairly easy to add to the FileAssociations.xml file. And then I can just double-click on them in MC to open them in their default application, or modify the default with Tools > Options > File Types. I suspect perhaps you're right and you have your FileAssociations.xml file all borked up.

[ferday]

You can do this now. I do it at work many times per week.

1. Arrange a View in MC with the Columns of the view set how you'd like it to appear in Excel.
2. Select all.
3. Right-click > Edit Commands > Copy.
4. Open a blank Excel worksheet.
5. Paste.

Done. When you copy the contents of any View (in MC's Standard View) to the clipboard, it copies the contents of the view in CSV format (including a column header row), which can be pasted into any application that can read CSV data.

thank you, good sir!

I don't have this trouble. Could you explain further?

I can import any file type into MC. It automatically supports most of the common office file types, but they're fairly easy to add to the FileAssociations.xml file. And then I can just double-click on them in MC to open them in their default application, or modify the default with Tools > Options > File Types. I suspect perhaps you're right and you have your FileAssociations.xml file all borked up.

i actually just did a clean up on my .xml and it was somewhat borky  

there is some issues with the external program, particularly on client machines.  from mwillems and the linked thread above, i can confirm this behaviour:

The "Launch with External Program (default)" option does not appear to work correctly with data files.  On a client machine, when I attempt to open a data file that I have local access to using the launch with external program (default) option, I would expect that function to pass the local file to the system default program for processing those files.  Instead MC opens a web browser and attempts to download the file, requesting the authentication password everytime as though the machine didn't have local access to the file and had never connected to the server before.  However, when I use "Launch with External Program (custom)" and pass the filename as an argument, it works correctly (showing that I do have local access to the files).  It's possible that it just doesn't respect the "Use Local File if Available" switch under media network (which is checked in my case).  Whatever is causing it, this makes using data files in a client/server environment much more challenging as one needs to specify a custom launcher command line for each file type

[glynor]

Ahh, yes. I remember seeing that. I haven't used the function much with client copies (which I think I said in the other thread).

Ok. That makes sense then. It'll bite me eventually.