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The lexicons are central databases that are managed using the same database server as the Catalogue, the so-called Spider. As opposed to the Catalogue databases, the lexicons support Unicode. To handle this, the Spider service has two separate ActiveX interfaces, one for ANSI databases, and another one for Unicode.

 

The Unicode database interface of the Spider service enables reading and writing directly from and to the lexicon databases. This possibility may be utilized to edit lexicons with Microsoft Excel.

 

An Excel sheet containing a suitable set of macros can therefore be used to first read the content of a lexicon, then edit it like for instance adding translations to words and phrases, and finally to write the changes back to the database.

 

This may be a very effective way of managing lexicons, where it can be handed over to language experts without cadett ELSA knowledge, instead of being handled by electrical engineers with limited foreign language skills. Only Excel will be needed to do the work. Nothing else.

 

An Excel sheet like this is available to download from cadett’s homepage www.cadett.com.

 

You use this Excel sheet in the following way:

 

1.Download the Excel sheet from www.cadett.com.

2.Open the Excel sheet in Microsoft Excel.

3.Enable macros.

4.In the Settings tab, please specify the IP address of the cadett ELSA server and the name of the Lexicon to manage. (In a local installation, the IP address is specified as 127.0.0.1).

5.Two macros are available:

LoadLexicon
SaveLexicon

6.With the LoadLexicon macro, you read the content of the specified lexicon to the Excel sheet.

7.With the SaveLexicon macro you write the changes that you have made in the Excel sheet to the specified lexicon.

8.Changes should be made in the Lexicon tab. The LexiconRef tab is used to store the original content, as it was before you started the editing. This reference information is used to detect which changes you have made, so that only changes will be transferred to the lexicon when you use the SaveLexicon command. It is therefore very important not to make any changes in the LexiconRef tab.