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aidleo
9th October 2011, 08:39 PM
Hi, Can anyone tell me how I can obtain Fields in Excel Format?.

I would like to place the fields in excel and apply a formula that will allocate points for each part of the Horses form etc.

If anyone could help me with this please let me know.

aidleo
11th October 2011, 08:24 AM
Anyone able to direct me where I may be able to find fields in excel format ?.

Shaun
11th October 2011, 10:41 AM
What you ask is not as simple as that, you can use web query to get the information in to excel but then you need to use formulas to extract the relevant information before you can use your formulas to allocate points.

If you had asked me a month ago i could have provided a sheet to do exactly this but the webpage that i used for this decided to make changes the screwed up my code and i have had no time to fix.

Do you know much about web queries or macros in excel?

aidleo
11th October 2011, 11:28 AM
Thanks for your reply Shaun, I dont know much about web queries or macros in excel, but I will ask someone who may.

I have just found bestform.com.au which is betselector I believe, maybe I can punch my formula into that and test my rating system, apparently you can place your own formula settings also and test your own system (will see what I find).

I do my own ratings where I manually punch the info into the excel sheet, this is where I was interested in obtaining all the race field info - recent form-course-distance- hometrack etc in excel to reduce the time consuming task of manual input.

If you have any ideas of where we may be able to obtain this I would be keen to know.

jazzy
11th October 2011, 01:08 PM
There are heaps of freebie fields / form sites now:

RISA - http://www.risa.com.au/

Cyberhorse - http://formguide.cyberhorse.com.au/index.php/Form/view-form.html

Racenet - http://www.racenet.com.au/racing-form-guide/

Racing and Sports - http://www.racingandsports.com.au/form-guide/


It is possible to write scripts to automagically download a day's form, parse it and save wanted data to a database or directly to an Excel spreadsheet using COM

But... most websites will evolve over time and this can play havoc with your script(s), so you need to be prepared to adapt if necessary.

I use (and highly recommend) Python myself.

aidleo, if you post up an example spreadsheet that details exactly what you want, I'll have a look see what I can come up with. You'd need to install Python on your 'puter.

Cheers

aidleo
12th October 2011, 07:53 AM
Thanks very much for your reply jazzy,

If you could send me an email to aidleo@yahoo.com I will send you the precise excel sheet I use with the criteria formula.

greatly appreciated

aidleo

Robot
12th October 2011, 10:38 AM
I am very interested in your PYTHON programming. Tried it unsuccessfully from a previous post of yours. Would it be possible for you to email me at bailyhoo@yahoo.com.au so that I may be able to contact you and ask a few questions.Thanks in anticipation ROBOT

jazzy
12th October 2011, 09:02 PM
Or you could post the questions to the other thread, perhaps the answers would be useful to others as well?

Cheers

Robot
13th October 2011, 09:56 AM
Thanks for your reply.From memory the previous thread is sometime ago and being a relative new member I have seen posts that bring ones attention to the date of the threads and refrain from replying to the older threads.My question is to open your file and run it in python.I downloaded the python programs you recommended but have trouble opening and running it doing something wrong obviously .

ROBOT

jazzy
13th October 2011, 10:42 AM
OK, This might be a longish post -

The Python setup/install programme doesn't seem to set the 'path' environment variable.. I dunno why not, it seems silly to me, and it always catches me out - I keep forgetting to tell new users that they have to set the path manually.

The Path environment variable is a ";" separated list of directories (folders) where the shell will search for an executable (Python.exe in this case)

So....With XP (Win 7 should be the same or similar at least)

Start -> Control Panel -> System
Advanced Tab
Environment Variables button ( near the bottom)

Select Path in the System Variables Scroll box (bottom one)
Click on Edit
Append ;C:\python27 to the value


To test it:

Open a command prompt
type python
you should get something like this:

Python 2.7.? (etc................)
Type "help", "copyright" etc....
>>>

Now test to make sure that the win32 extensions are installed correctly:

Type import win32com

You should get no error


Bingo! you're good to go. Type quit() to exit

Now, to run the script you can double click on the .py file and it should open a command prompt and run,,, but if there's an error it will stop and the command prompt will disappear before you can read what the error was.

Better to open a command prompt, change to the directory where the script is and run it from the command line.


-----------------

As an aside: I _think_ that the Python3.x installs now update the Path environment variable - but Python 3 is NOT backwardly compatible with 2, I'm starting to use 3 - but some of the 3rd party libraries I use haven't been ported over yet.

Brosco
14th October 2011, 11:25 AM
jazzy,
I am currently writing a program to do this. It extracts from:

http://racingguide.centrebet.com/

Currently it extracts the html for each race meeting and I'm currently working on converting this html to csv format (that is fine for excel). It should be ready in a week or 2 if you are interested.

Shaun
14th October 2011, 12:15 PM
That site looks ok, i might have to see if i can import to excel and use the form from it.

Brosco
14th October 2011, 12:28 PM
happy to give you a copy of the program as well if you are interested :)

Shaun
14th October 2011, 02:05 PM
shaun2166@hotmail.com

drop me an e-mail there and i will send you my main e-mail address.

Robot
17th October 2011, 07:20 PM
Thanks for the previous post.I have found my way to the path but being not quite sure if I can cause trouble I have a buddy a lot more cluey than myself who is going to help me later on this week.Hope to have your file up and running. Will notify you of the outcome. Regards ROBOT