harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Harmony didn’t find anything in my PDF

Harmony tends to perform better if you upload a file with item numbers.

If there are are no question numbers in the instrument, it’s very hard for Harmony to distinguish question text from other content such as the copyright information. Click here to see an example PDF with question numbers included.

Also, if your PDF is a scanned document, please see if you can find a fully digitised (OCR’ed) version of the document.

We suggest either finding a file with question numbers or better quality content. Or try a different file format such as Word, Excel or CSV. We have guidance on formatting your files for Harmony.

Harmony supports:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • CSV
  • PDF - however if you are having problems parsing PDFs please try another format.

Finally, feel free to raise an issue to let us know that your PDF isn’t being parsed. Please also share the PDF in question. Harmony is an open source tool for social sciences research.

Related Posts

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop On 2 May 2025, Dr Eoin McElroy demonstrated Harmony at the MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop in Deutsche Bank. Eoin’s presentation focused on “Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization.” The workshop brought together researchers interested in applying novel harmonisation techniques to existing datasets. Eoin explained traditional harmonisation processes and presented a user-friendly guide to the Harmony tool, demonstrating how natural language processing can streamline the harmonisation process.
'Send to Harmony' Chrome plugin

'Send to Harmony' Chrome plugin

[Beta mode: we are currently testing this extension] We have developed a browser extension for Harmony called “Send to Harmony” which lets you send selected text to Harmony with a right-click. For PDFs, use the popup to paste your selected text. Send to Harmony enables users to send selected text to the Harmony Data Harmonization (https://harmonydata.ac.uk/) platform for analysis. This plugin provides a right-click or context menu item which allows users to easily bring text from into their harmonisations, making it easier to compare and analyze different measurement scales across research studies.

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