All documents can be exported into a tabular format for purposes of further analysis and/or printing. This includes documents that were created by ELAN itself (see Section 4.2.1 and Section 4.2.3) as well as documents that were imported into ELAN from Shoebox (see Section 4.2.17) Do the following:
Click on
menu.Click on
.The
dialog window is displayed, e.g.:Figure 4.42. Export as tab-delimited text dialog window
Click here to select the tiers to be exported.
Change the order of the tiers.
Click here to export a selected time interval only.
Add time offset from the master media to the annotation times.
Annotations sharing the same begin and end time are exported in the same row.
Select time information and format.
Add extra time format expressed in hours, minutes, seconds and frame.
By default, ELAN exports all annotations, but it is possible to restrict the export process to selected annotations. The following three options are available:
Export only those annotations that correspond to a selected time interval. Do the following:
In the ELAN window, select the desired time interval (see Section 5.6.1).
In the
dialog window, click in the box to the left of . A checkmark appears indicating that this option has been selected.Export only those annotations that are contained on particular tiers. Do the following:
In the
dialog window, select those tiers that you want to export. A checkmark appears next to any selected tier.Export only those annotations that (a) correspond to a particular time interval and (b) are contained on particular tiers. To do this, combine the two steps under (a) and (b) above.
By selecting Section 4.2.2).
you can add to the annotation times the time offset from the master media that originated from the synchronization of media files (seeThe option
gives each tier its own column in the export file. Annotations that have the same begin time and the same end time are exported to the same row i.e. the same tab-delimited line.If you check Repeat values of annotations
spanning other annotations
the spanning
annotation is put in each row containing an annotation
it spans. The spanning annotation is not in a row by
itself.
The option Only repeat within annotation
hierarchies
limits the previous option. An
annotation is only repeated if it is on one of the
ancestor tiers in the annotation hierarchy.
Select the time markers you want to export (begin time, end time and/or duration of every annotation unit).
Choose the time format (hh:mm:ss.ms, ss.msec, milliseconds and/or SMPTE timecode)
![]() | Note |
---|---|
If you choose the SMPTE (hh:mm:ss.ff) format, the selected video standard (PAL or NTSC) just indicates the way seconds and milliseconds are converted to frame numbers. This is independent of the actual video standard of the associated video(s). |
Click
to start the export process; otherwise click to exit the dialog box without exporting the annotations.Finally you will see a save dialog window. In the Encoding drop down box a text encoding can be selected (either iso-latin, UTF-8 or UTF-16). Make an appropriate choice and click on
.![]() | Note |
---|---|
Some Mac applications, like TextEdit, have difficulties to load UTF-8 encoded files. This is most noticeable for “special” characters, e.g. IPA. Using UTF-16 is recommended in that case. |
A message appears to inform you that the file has been
exported. The exported file has the extension
*.txt
.
The exported file contains the following information: participant, begin time of each annotation, end time, total length, content, and tier. It can be opened with any program that can handle tab-delimited texts, e.g., Microsoft Excel.
![]() | Note |
---|---|
Some versions of Excel seem to have problems importing tab-separated files (white rectangles are shown instead of the column borders). As a workaround you can open the text file first in a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and copy and paste the content into Excel. |