Quick Tinderbox Schema Design Via Spreadsheet

“[...] it’s great to know that you can just copy a table in Numbers and paste it into Tinderbox 4 and everything just works. The top row of labels maps onto a list of attributes. New attributes are created when appropriate, and old attributes are used when that makes sense. Each row becomes a note.”

Mark Bernstein: Tinderbox 4: Spreadsheets

While Tinderbox is brilliant at allowing the structure of your notes to emerge over time, and adding attributes (custom metadata for your notes) without having to design a schema up-front, sometimes you have some starting notes with a clear set of starting attributes and values. Adding each of these attributes in Tinderbox one by one can be laborious, but a simple way to add new user attributes and get the values for each entered at the same time is to create a table in Excel or the new Numbers application from Apple. Then you simply copy and paste straight into Tinderbox.

By doing this you can use a spreadsheet to sketch out a quick schema for notes in a Tinderbox document, and continue to use prototypes to develop and maintain the schema. This can be done quickly and easily after pasting from the spreadsheet:

• copy one of the new notes
• empty out the key attribute values
• give the new prototype a name
• set IsPrototype=true

So this is not simply another way to get data into Tinderbox but a way to get structure into Tinderbox and shows how Tinderbox is becoming just as comfortable with the quantitative as it has been with the qualitative.

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