Indented Format

In the Indented file format, the content is hierarchical, which means it contains categories and one or more levels of subcategories. Furthermore, its structure is indented to denote this hierarchy. Each row in the file contains either a category or subcategory, but subcategories are indented from the categories and any sub-subcategories are indented from the subcategories, and so on. You can manually create this structure in Microsoft Excel or use one that was exported from another product and saved into an Microsoft Excel format.

  • Top level category codes and category names occupy the columns A and B, respectively. Or, if no codes are present, then the category name is in column A.
  • Subcategory codes and subcategory names occupy the columns B and C, respectively. Or, if no codes are present, then the subcategory name is in column B. The subcategory is a member of a category. You cannot have subcategories if you do not have top level categories.
Table 1. Indented structure with codes
Column A Column B Column C Column D
Category code (optional) Category name    
  Subcategory code (optional) Subcategory name  
    Sub-subcategory code (optional) Sub-subcategory name
Table 2. Indented structure without codes
Column A Column B Column C
Category name    
  Subcategory name  
    Sub-subcategory name

The following information can be contained in a file of this format:

  • Optional codes must be values that uniquely identify each category or subcategory. If you specify that the data file does contain codes (Contains category codes option in the Content Settings step), then a unique code for each category or subcategory must exist in the cell directly to the left of category/subcategory name. If your data does not contain codes, but you want to create some codes later, you can always generate codes later (Categories > Manage Categories > Autogenerate Codes).
  • A required name for each category and subcategory. Subcategories must be indented from categories by one cell to the right in a separate row.
  • Optional annotations in the cell immediately to the right of the category name. This annotation consists of text that describes your categories/subcategories.
  • Optional keywords can be imported as descriptors for categories. In order to be recognized, these keywords must exist in the cell directly below the associated category/subcategory name and the list of keywords must be prefixed by the underscore (_) character such as _firearms, weapons / guns. The keyword cell can contain one or more words used to describe each category. These words will be imported as descriptors or ignored depending on what you specify in the last step of the wizard. Later, descriptors are compared to the extracted results from the text. If a match is found, then that record or document is scored into the category containing this descriptor.

Important! If you use a code at one level, you must include a code for each category and subcategory. Otherwise, the import process will fail.