I just spent an hour trying to bulk add 50 words from Excel.
I’m making a German-Dutch course, I have the words in an excel table, German in column A, Dutch in column B. I selected “separate words by tab” and copied-pasted the words from Excel.
Now, first of all, even though the editor said I should first put the German word and then the Dutch, which I did, the words were added in the wrong order. I tried again with swapped columns, again failure.
So I ended up changing the word “German” for “Dutch” and “Dutch” for “German” above the table headers.
Then unfortunately some German words had mistakenly ended up in the Dutch part and some Dutch words in the German part, for reasons unknown. I had to manually change them in order to make them right.
Also one word seemed to be missing, which I tried to add by clicking “Add word”, but it seems that then the level is not saved, which means that the word is not really added (the “save and continue” button is missing there).
All in all, a horrible experience. Apparently the whole copy-paste procedure from Excel is suboptimal, and there should be a better way to do that, especially a way that doesn’t cost so much time and is actually accurate.
I’m not sure if this going to be useful for you, but I personally prefer Google sheets (I also don’t have Excel and use the free Open Office instead if I have to).
I like the syncing functionality which lets me work from everywhere on my files, and when I want to bulk-add them, the copy-pasting from Google sheets hasn’t failed so far. I’m also using tab-separated.
But of course, maybe this is a recently introduced bug, there are several posts about it in the forum, so maybe every bulk action fails at the moment.
I’m here in Novermber 2017, and I get the same issue! I’m making a Latin course for English speakers, but when I bulk add from excel, every so often the order of a Latin or English word gets swapped around. This is very frustrating, especially since this problem never happened when I was bulk adding lists in Quizlet or other competitors. The frustration of creating a course makes me not want to recommend Memrise to my students. Memrise needs to address these bugs in order to stay competitive.
EDIT: Also, I tried the suggestion of copying directly from Google Sheets. This did not resolve the issue - there was randomly a Latin word in the English column and vice versa.
EDIT: Possible workaround. I tried pasting my bulk upload data from Google Sheets into Notepad, then pasting from Notepad into the Memrise bulk uploader. This worked without a glitch for 17 levels (each level had 20 words in it, so about 340 words), until I finished all my uploads. I am not sure if this was pure luck for 17 tries, so I recommend (as annoying as it is) checking your words as you go. However, pasting into Notepad first seemed to make the bulk uploader behave. This is still a bad user experience but at least that seems to make it work.
I just tried this method you suggested (and, in fact, had been thinking of doing it before I even read your post). I had been using Google Sheets (most recently) and had never encountered a problem, but this time I am trying to add a third language to a course and for some reason only one word in the column for the third language shows up (even after copying from Google sheets and then pasting into a .txt doc and then copying and pasting again into the Memrise course).
I can’t figure out why it doesn’t copy all of the words from the third column. The only thing I can think of is that when Memrise asks you to set up a course, it asks you which language you want to teach and the language of the intended students. Does that have something to do with this problem?
I don’t know but I will continue looking for a solution to this problem. It is the first time I have ever encountered it with Memrise. If I come up with something I’ll share it here.
This is what I wound up doing and it seemed to work:
First of all, I examined my spreadsheet a bit more carefully and realized that some fields had automatically been considered formulas when I pasted from Google Sheets to Excel. So, the first thing I did was go through it and clean that up.
Second, I did a trial test by creating a new course. This time I selected German for Spanish speakers. I tried to select more than one language for the students it would be designed for, but it wouldn’t allow me to do that, so I just left it at German for Spanish speakers. (I chose “Spain,” not “Mexico,” but I don’t think it matters.)
Third, I went back to my spreadsheet and made Spanish the second column and moved the English column to third place (other columns were added as well, to include both audio and image).
Fourth, I then performed a new bulk add in this test course, and it worked perfectly.
Note: When you copy from Google Sheets to Excel, the default pasting option is HTML. I chose “Text” each time I pasted and I recommend you select that option as well.
Also, if you set up your course in some other way, you don’t need to delete it and start over. You can simply go back to details and change the language settings on that page. (It’s toward the bottom.)
