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agamoto Posts: 45
7/19/2021
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I just spent over 10 minutes going through 3 pages of publishers exporting to excel.
I had to click "raw" and "graded" 250+ times for all the different publishers in my collection.
Is there no other way to export the collection data beyond per publisher exports or printing a list of everything in each of my boxes? That's not much better as I have 215 boxes.
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agamoto Posts: 45
7/20/2021
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Alright, so now I just spent the last hour+ clicking on message after message from the system telling me that a particular publisher's excel file is ready to download. I have 28,400+ raw and graded comics, spread across 290 publishers.
To expedite grabbing the excel for each publisher, I sorted my messages in groups of 100, and then scrolled down the list of messages, right clicking on each link to open that message in a new tab. I then went to each new tab and clicked the excel link to save the excel file, I then closed the tab and moved on to the next tab until all 100 excel link tabs were processed, then I'd move on to the next 100 message block.
The message system is clever enough to eliminate any links that were previously open, however, I'm 100% certain my fingers slipped a few times during this process and I opened, then accidently closed, at least a few excel tabs, but I have no idea at all which publisher link I missed and I'll have to reconcile somehow later.
I now have a folder on my desktop with 305 excel files from each different publisher.
I take a look inside the excel files and I see they are very heavily formatted. All the info is there, but it's formatted in such a way that makes it absolutely useless for any sort of collection analysis. Compounding this is the way in which the titles are grouped in the excel workbook with each individual title sorted on a separate alphanumerical labelled worksheet.
Worst of all, the excel files do not indicate the box location of each issue. I have titles and issues scattered across 215+ boxes. The comics are fragmented across these boxes and are not contiguously stored in alphanumerical order. There's no way to locate any of my books with these excel files. Ultimately, they are completely useless to me and I just wasted the past 1.5 hours.
1.5 hours is a drop in the bucket of time I've spent on the site inventorying and grading all my comics, so I'll have to figure out something else. It seems my only option is to "print" a list of books in each separate box, then convert the printed results into spreadsheet rows, then figure out a way to manipulate that into something useful.
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Ronbatman Administrator Posts: 2379
7/20/2021
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We have things put into an Excel file by publisher to protect our data. We routinely and constantly have people and organizations trying to steal our data. No one wants to input 1.1 million books into their database when it's so much easier to steal ours. I understand with your very large collection it's time-consuming and I'm sorry, but we are not going to be changing it. We have more than double the data of our largest competitor.
Ron
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agamoto Posts: 45
7/20/2021
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Yikes... Well, combining the worksheets that you've got split by alphanumerical worksheets is simple enough, but the "by publisher" XLS files are still useless without the location or box identifier listed for each separate issue as I have numerous duplicates and titles are highly fragmented.
Is it within the realm of possibility to alter the output of the publisher results to include the box identifier field on each issue row? If so, that's all I need.
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agamoto Posts: 45
7/20/2021
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So, lacking the box information on the publisher export spreadsheets, I chose to try the Box Content Printout export method.
It's nice that this method maintains the numerical grades assigned, while the per publisher sheets do not. and unlike the publisher exports, these results have the box location information baked in. One thing this output lacks is information notes on the variant or key information. Which sucks, but whatever.
It took me around 40 minutes to save to pdf, convert to excel via adobe.com, then arrange the spreadsheet so that you can actually use the data.
I have 216 more boxes to go through like this... I do NOT have an additional 144 hours of time to fix something that could be easily solved with a simple CSV output.
How much will it cost to get you to run a private SQL query to pull the data fields I need for just my books? I'm already a paying member, but I CANNOT afford to spend 144 freaking hours on this stuff.
THIS is useful...
THIS is not...
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