MacDive Forums

Just downloaded Mac Dive and I'm putting in my dives pre- D4 manually
However I have about 76 to do which is a long process.
However about 60 were in the same place at the same depth doing more or less the same stuff.
I tried to put in one dive with the dive length of all these dives but that means one dive of about 68 hours which, shall we say, buggers up the average bottom time function.
Does anyone know a way of quickly entering in multiple dives?
I have all my dives on an excell spreadsheet if that helps

Well, you can change the location/site/country etc all at once - anything on the side panel that slides out, or on the info tab, will work with multiple dives selected. Unfortunately if the durations are different, there's no way to bulk add them, short of converting your excel data to another format that *is* supported and then importing.

Some of this is made easier in MD2, but unfortunately the nature of those values being different means without a supported import format (like UDCF or something) it's not a straightforward thing to do.

Are you familiar at all with perl or any other scripting language? That would make this easy

What might I ask is UDCF?
Other formats that are supported?
??????
No, unfortunately, I don't know scripting
Oh well ten a night is only a week:-)

UDCF (universal dive computer format) is a type of file that macdive can read/write. Easiest way to explain is if you select a dive you've got from your D4 and in macdive go to Export -> UDCF, and then take a look at that file in a text editor.

By "other format" I mean something like this - there are a couple, though UDCF is really the only generic one.

By any chance would v2.0 support importing of a CSV file? excel can export to a CSV.

If this is the case you could simply wait for v2.

Importing CSV is difficult, because short of specifying a particular format that macdive expects, you can't reliably deal with every variation of data people will export. And if that's the case, you might as well just go the extra step and convert your data to the oceanic CSV format that *is* supported, or UDCF.