Fields in Excel Format?
 

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.

Anyone able to direct me where I may be able to find fields in excel format ?.

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?

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.

There are heaps of freebie fields / form sites now:

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

Cyberhorse - http://formguide.cyberhorse.com.au/.../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

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

JAZZY
 

Or you could post the questions to the other thread, perhaps the answers would be useful to others as well?

Cheers

JAZZY
 

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

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.