End pen & paper form
 

can anyone help me end having to rank runners with pen and paper...i use sportsman chartform and would like to find a way to download it so i can use a spreadsheet (like excel or preferably lotus improv) to rank runners by avg prizemoney, win and place % etc...i want to avoid scanning or laboriously typing it in...does anyone know where you can get basic info age, sex, starts, wins, places, prizemoney to make your own form guide of days racing fields downloaded to a spreadsheet????

http://www.virtualformguide.com/cgi-bin/tvf/access.pl



select your race and choose TFV3

How do ou get the information into a spreadsheet though?


Cheers

G'day TS

The form from that page that will fit into a spreadsheet nicely is the field part at the top. What you do is click up towards the top left of that screen near the race number - while holding the mose button down ,drag the mouse down and you will see that the text on the page becomes highlighted. Once you've highlighted the stuff you want you can let go of the mouse button. Now hold down the CTRL key and press the C key. This will copy that text to the clipboard ( nothing seems to happen so you won't get a message saying it's copied.) Now open up an excel spreadsheet and in the A1 square do CTRL + V ( this means hold the CTRL key down and then press the V key ) this should then paste all of the data in and it should be in there own separate cells and columns.

The individual horse form below the field part which has latest runs etc. can also be copied but you will see it doesn't get put in columns as managable as just the field part. The excel boffins on here are prob clever enough to makeup some sort of macro that will automatically format it to a format they prefer. Bit of mucking about involved there to do that though.

Hope this helps.

Mick

Oh one last thing , the new nswtab site , as slow as it is , prob has the other half of the data you don't get from that page. Only prob is you have to have an account and log it to get it. If you have , got to the race in question and click on DFS and then you'll see the field with race starts and placings etc. That coupled with the API and other stuff from that first page could be quite handy. Bit of mucking about though

Oh just a simple control c, control v, i was under the impression there was some way of officially "importing" the file but thanks a lot mick for taking the time to reply.


Cheers

This is probably opening a can of worms in that it probably is to complex to explain here, but how do you get excel to like list each thing in order of highest to lowest?

thanks ts and mickmc for replies,
i haven't used excel...i started with lotus 123 - ?does anyone remember it...anyway it got updated to lotus improv - don't even know if still available but it is trually the most user friendly spreadsheet i've used...
i actually don't have excel but b/c so widely available i gathered it would be the one for imports and/or scans, so not sure re ranking

The problem with listing them in order is once you set it up to list say the top win % when you sort another topic you will upset the first mix......what i would do it place a number beside each item in order of selection than maybe add a calculation to add them together to get a top ranking.

I have found the easiest way to inport the form part is to copy to text document then import the text doc making the adjust ments to the way it is diasplyed....takes about 3 seconds to import.

shaun, thanks for this info...(and earlier revirtual formguide)...i'm going to try imports to lotusimprov first...if it doesn't work will go to excel which sounds like the old lotus123 where formulas are embedded in cells...lotusimprov like i've said is so much more friendly...anyway other avenue is to try importing dfs as mickmc suggests straight off Racetab nsw...it's all a bit over my head re ranking/ upsetting mix in excell but different views don't phase me...the good thing about improv which i've spent time on is you can transferr data from worksheets and do graphs etc... probably same in excell...the main aim is to cut down time-consuming form analysis because i believe in the current climate you need all the time and energy you can get to make an informed decision and bet last-minute...in a sense i suppose it's 'late-mail' betting (or not as the case may be) in order to find overs and derive value...

Yeh - just the control c stuff. I actually work in IT and have people of all different levels to support - so I never take for granted anyone's level of knowledge. Prob didn't need such a long winded reply - but you never can tell : - )
I've tried to download and copy and paste from quite a few sites , never can get exactly what I want unfortunately