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Old 9th April 2006, 04:33 PM
Chrome Prince Chrome Prince is offline
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Join Date: Jan 1970
Posts: 4,426
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wesmip,

this is what i do with web results....

I have sheet1 in an excel workbook, on this sheet i have a formula which is part of the url. I then have to manually fill down the date meeting id and number of races (not that time consuming - I do a week in about 10 minutes).

Now I run a macro which reads each url cell (part of a formula) and does a web query then is pasted to sheet2. On sheet3 are all the formulae which parse the data and keep the information in a format I can import direct to my database.

The macro then copies the DATA from sheet3 and pastes into a newly created workbook in a folder on the desktop.

It works well, but I have to interrogate the data, as the ************s keep changing the page format on a regular basis to curb such practices.

E.G. one week the date will look like this:

Date: 01/01/2006

The next week it looks like this:

Date
10/01/2006

Clearly they are trying to thwart canny operators

Also when they have a mystery bet or some special promotion, it stuffs up the columns, so I just go back and fill it in manually.

I'd say all in all it takes a couple of hours to properly do a week's racing, but then I add extra stuff to it also,so it might not take as long for someone else.

I can't provide the actual sheets, as it took me a few months to build, and it has bugs which need to be ironed out from time to time.

My suggestion is to use my method and when you get stuck, record a partial macro and just edit it step by step.

I find using formulae to manipulate data the best way of quickly doing it without knowing too much advanced coding.
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