Site Forum

Hi all. Is there an option to download collections in a spreadsheet format that is easier to work with than the funkily formatted pdf that's the default option? Thanks!!

There is not.  Best you can get is to do a select-all kind of thing and then paste to excel.  Or into a flat file and import that into Excel using standard separator logic, etc.

Thanks! Would be great if this option were added at some point!!!

Not going to happen. Been asked for many time over and Admin has given no inclination on entertaining it.

I wonder what the hesitation is. Are they worried that it will enable uploading to a competitor site? I've played around with a few different sites/apps and none of them are perfect, but would be a huge plus here to allow members to download their own collections in spreadsheet form so they can manage the data outside of the site. Oh well, ya takes what ya can gets.

Or just maintain excel files that mimic your collections here, then don’t have to worry about having to D/l

That's what i do. Copy/paste and format for the info I want. 

Admin really doesn't have any incentive to implement this because he'd want to keep members using the site as much as possible, not make it more convenient to use alternatives. There are plenty of costs associated with running a site like this so page views and ads are important for it to keep going.

As others have said here, I also keep a few things in personal spreadsheets (Google Sheets, since it's free and those are easily accessible anywhere you have a data/WiFi connection), but that's mostly because the functionality to track it doesn't exist here (at least not yet).

That said, the inventory management system here takes care of more than 90% of my needs and I think it's fantastic, plus it makes trading here a breeze.

Fair. I'm just terrible at Excel and would love them to provide me a head start!

Because it's a lot of complicated work to do. This database is a whole lot more than our collections. It's our "friends". It's our personal information that we've chosen to enter, yet may not be sharing. It's the private messages we've sent to other members. It's our passwords. It's these board postings. It's our want lists and our trade lists. Etc etc etc.

Admin would need to go table by table in the database to identify what is downloadable and what is not. 

And if you know anything about databases, you know that a straight download of data wouldn't even be useful as is. Many records might just be pointers, or encrypted, or normalized. To be useful, a mosaic of data from multiple tables would have to be put together and pulled.

Is a programming project over and above a simple data dump. 

Time consuming. No justified gain for the effort. I wouldn't do it either if I was admin.

But I WOULD love that feature. ;)