Pop report tool

brucemo

Pop report tool

That's a program that converts the pop report HTML format in to tab-delimited Excel format. It is an executable. It is dangerous to download executables from the web and run them on your computer, but I wrote the program and compiled it, and it doesn't contain any viruses, and it shouldn't screw up your computer. If it does screw up your computer, please complain but don't sue me.

Here is how to use it.

1) Download it and put it somewhere.
2) From Internet Explorer, find the pop report page you want, and save it ("File/Save As") in "Web Page, HTML only" format.
3) Get a command prompt, and run the program thusly: "pop file1.htm > file2.txt", where "file1" is the name of the HTML file you saved, and "file2" is the name of the text file you want to make. The program should take essentially no time to run.
4) Load the resulting text file into Excel as a text file. You should see the pop report fields exactly the way you want them.

I could spend 200 lines of text writing exactly how to do the above four steps, so nobody gets confused, but someone will get confused anyway.

If there is a specific pop report page that this program won't eat (I tried '52 Bowman, T-206, and some random Japanese issue), please let me know via email. If the program suddenly stops working, please let me know, because it's highly dependent upon the format of PSA's web page, which can change any time.

The program is designed to be used by the program's author and other competent people, and therefore this software may annoy wimps. If you use it in any way other than intended, it could vomit or defecate explosively. There are numerous potential bugs which I intend to find via tearful stories from users.

This tool is provided free of charge, so keep that in mind if you want to complain that you didn't get what you paid for.

Thank you,

bruce

jrinck

I emailed Charlie about possibly having them offer some pop report analysis tools, perhaps for a fee or simply to add value and attract more subs to the pop and SMR.

He said he likes the idea and will think about it.

When you've got people putting spreadsheets together as well as a geek like me who wrote a software program, it's quite clear that such a service would be welcomed with open arms.

Isn't this how companies get started?

theBobs

Thanks Bruce, I will give it a try.

And thanks JRinck for the Excel lesson (although I haven't had time to test the fix yet).

Brian

brucemo

You guys are going on in the Excel thread about doing copy/paste to transfer pop report data. This tool does all of this very easily, once you get past the problem of using it from the command-line.

bruce