Excel help

[mulls74]

Hello all
I am looking for a little help with Excel. I would like to be able to take the racecard data from the internet (or another suitable source) and create racecards in excel.
The information required would be each separated by tabs:
Racecard number
Draw (if applicable)
Last six runs formline
Horse
Days since last run
CD BF Blinkers etc
Age
Weight
Jockey name
All separated by tabs.

IE
1<t>(2)<t>283307<t>HORSE NAME<t>22<t>CDBF<t>6<t>8-11<t>J Bloggs

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Nafsasp]

You might find it easier, given the fields you want, to set it up in Access, although I have always found Excel easier to manipulate.

My own way of achieving this would be simply to copy/paste the information straight on to a spreadsheet, and then cut/paste etc into the desired format.

Are you an experienced Excel user, a casual user, or pretty much new to it?

My favourite horses - Red Rum, Spanish Steps, Proud Tarquin, Esban, Go-Pontinental, Barona, Charles Dickens, The Dikler, Astbury, Black Secret, Vulgan Town, Huperade, Well To Do, Crisp, Quintus, Argent, Colebridge, Pearl Of Montreal, Nereo, Sonny Somers, Tubs VI, Tartan Ace, Red Candle, L'Escargot, Bula, Beau Bob, Rouge Autumn, Rough Silk, Frodo, Deblin's Green, Prince Tino, Eyecatcher, The Pilgarlic, Captain Christy, Mr Midland, Interview II, Credit Call, My Virginian, Flush Of Diamonds, Scout, Money Ma

[davidbrady]

I don’t think it is possible to import the info into Excel without having the Draw linked to the Racecard No (ie they can’t be separated into different tabs) or the Days since a run & BF,CD etc linked to the Horse Name.

I can’t find a site which separates them when the info is imported into Excel anyway.

The other problem I have is that Excel sometimes reads certain form lines as an actual number and changes the form figures to what the program thinks makes more sense.

[mulls74]

Thanks for the replies – davidbrady which site would you say gets closest to what I am looking for?

[davidbrady]

The Sporting Life is probably the best to import the cards into Excel

Using Excel 2007

1. Open up the racecard which you want to import. Copy the web address from the address bar.

2. Open up Excel and select Cell A1

3. Click "Data" and "From Web" – this will bring up a little box with your home page. Paste the address bar into the address bar in the little box and click "Go" – this should bring up the Sporting Life racecard in the little box

4. You should see a few small yellow arrows on the Sporting Life webpage. Scroll down until you see the one just to the left of the "No" part of the racecard. Click this yellow arrow – the racecard should then be highlighted in the Sporting Life webpage

5. Click "Import" and the racecard should import into Excel for you with the following errors:

(a) The draw is in the same cell as the racecard number
(b) The Days since a run and CD, BF etc are in the same cell as the Horse Name
(c) The weight is shown as a date in Excel

I’m not sure how to import using Excel 2003 but I’m sure it’s something along the same lines.

If you prefer to use the Racing Post I find it easier to just Cut and Paste using the "show all races at this meeting" option. This transfer to Excel better than when an individual race is selected.

[Craig]

One way that you can do this is via Raceform Interactive as you can choose what you Delimit with (it tells you what it is – usually a comma) and then when you open the downloaded document in Excel you can then select what the delimiter was (in this case a comma) and all is in columns for you. All you have to do for Excel to stop thinking everything is a number is to click on the top of a column and then click on it being ‘text’ and it remains as it was.

Raceform is about £45 per month for either jumps of flat.

As for free sites, sportinglife is probably your best bet!

Good luck.

[davidbrady]

All you have to do for Excel to stop thinking everything is a number is to click on the top of a column and then click on it being ‘text’ and it remains as it was.

Once Excel changes a number to whatever format it deems correct it doesn’t necessarily change it back exactly to the original format when text format is selected.

For example – take Time For Rupert’s form

Type 1-7122 into Excel and Excel automatically changes it to Jan-22. Change the format to text and Excel then changes it to 1907298 which is totally different to what was originally entered into Excel.

[bagnallc]

If you format the cells as text before typing in, or format cells and then paste-special text you can avoid the annoying change scenario

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