converting XML to lists??

[Colby]

Well tragedy happened, and following a long ice storm, power surges and cold humidity I lost 2 harddrives. 180Gb of media. All of my music and games/emulators. So now Im in the rebuilding stage. My question is: Does anybody know how I can convert my xml databases into a working list? How would I pull out the artist- album name to generate a list? And likewise for my video games.

Any help would be appriciated.

[samgreco]

Colby,

First - Ouch, sorry to hear that. I've been thinking about RAID or going to the upcoming Windows Home Server for this very reason. I NEVER backup, as much as I always have good intentions to do so.

As for the XML files, have you tried just pulling the files into Excel? I just tried it with the music.xml and got a nicely formattd, columned list. I assume that's what you're looking for.

Sam

[Colby]

Thanks samgreco thats was a good idea. It worked; I opened the XML in excel then took the display column made a new workbook of it, then I filteredit to remove duplicate entries (lines of tracks). I now at least have a list of what albums I am replacing. :/

[samgreco]

Damn fine question. I haven't been able to filter it that way, but I can see how it would be annoying and cumbersome.

So I tried it in Access and it worked beautifully. Now I have Office 2007 so I don't know how it works on earlier versions, but here's what I did:

Create a blank database.
Go to the External Data menu
Import XML File
Point to the file you want
Let it use the default tables, etc., and Select Structure and Data
You may get an error telling you it couldn't import everything. Let that go.
I don't know where it is in earlier versions, but you need to select ITEM:Table. Then go to the TYPE column and you should see a dropdown.
Deselct everything except ALBUM (or whatever you're working on at the time)

That should do it.

If you have an earlier version of Office, I could fire up one of my older machines and check it out, but I think structurally it's basically the same.