Stop! Please note that LOVD2 is no longer supported. The last security release is from October 2020. Upgrade to LOVD3 to continue receiving updates.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

LOVD supports importing your variant and patient information from tab delimited text files, data preferably enclosed by double quotes. These can be taken from a LOVD download, or saved from a spreadsheet program such as OpenOffice.org Calc or MS Excel. Please note that you can't directly import OpenOffice.org or MS Excel files into LOVD, first save the data as a tab-delimited text file.

Many users run into problems when their spreadsheet program decides to malform their data. These programs are well known to do so, if they think your data may actually mean something else. Text fields with values that could be interpreted as a written date and the LOVD time stamps are converted to spreadsheet-specific format, making it impossible to properly import the file in LOVD. Also, it was reported that MS Excel even deleted data when it considered a data field too long (>255 characters).

Make sure you have read our instructions on how to import variant and patient data in the LOVD manual.
Specifically, the note at the top is important; make sure you format all cells to "Text" before importing/pasting the downloaded data!

If you're still having problems with importing even though you followed these instructions, please contact us, and include the exact error messages given by LOVD during import. Also, please paste the relevant lines of your import file into the message box, so we can try and help you figure out what went wrong.

Last modified 2014/08/25 14:48:36 CEST

When using or discussing LOVD please refer to:
Fokkema IF, Taschner PE, Schaafsma GC, Celli J, Laros JF, den Dunnen JT (2011). LOVD v.2.0: the next generation in gene variant databases. Hum Mutat. 2011 May;32(5):557-63.

LOVD has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nº 200754 - the GEN2PHEN project.
Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands
Ing. Ivo F.A.C. Fokkema, Dr. Johan T. den Dunnen