Better than CSV: Really Cool HTML exports
In
this thread I suggest a method of getting csv files to your PC from RS Forms on the web, using Eudora and Excel Macros. Well all that works BUT not if you want to use non-English characters. That's nearly everyone.
The problem is that plain text e-mails (and data exported in a .csv file from a MYSQL) database encode characters for languages such as Greek and Russian. Web pages display them all but it is a fact that when you import a CSV into excel, all these codes are displayed instead of the characters, which is a major pain in the neck!
In a nutshell, what looked like this on my web page : Δημιουργία λογαριασμού τώρα Looked like a dogs dinner by the time it got to excel. I can't demonstrate here because the web browser convers the raw code back to the right characters but each letter has 6 characters beginning with &, followed by # and then a four digit number. You get the picture.
I want to print address labels in local character fonts. The God of Macro-witing could not change these codes back once they're in excel, apparently.
To cut a long story short, setup your RS Form Pro admin e-mail to send you a table, one row high. The table could look like this (subject to your field names)
<table border=\"0\"><tbody><tr><td>column A for deletion</td><td>{name1:value} </td><td>{name2:value} </td><td>{address1:value} </td><td>{telephone1:value} </td></tr></tbody></table>Design the table to have just the fields you want in the order you want them to appear in excel.
Again, setup and use eudora as descibed in
this thread . When you have received some e-mails from your RSForm(s), the Inbox will be populated as a text file containing alternate headers and bodies. Each body is a single row table from the admin e-mails.
The trick to making this work is all in the way you open the Eudora mailbox in excel. If you just do \"file-open\" it will not work, so here's the trick:
NB this only works with excel2003, and not 2000 or 2007
In excel, do file - open - set the file type to \"all web pages\". This forces Excel to treat the incoming file as HTML code. The file we are trying to open is called in.mbx so it does not appear in excel's file browser, so type in In.mbx and click Open. This is so neat:- each form's submission is contained on one row, with alternate rows containing e-mail headers. All special characters are preserved!
Deleting the first column strips out the mail headers, and the macro referred to in the other thread strips out the empty rows. To make it easy to operate it is desirable to make the file opening routine into an excel macro - because the file you're opening always has the same name.
Once again, bind the whole lot up in one super-macro so that Excel opens and formats the file in one click. Perhaps for finesse the macro could include a \"save as XLS\" routine to prevent you from overwriting In.mbx.
I hope someone can make as much use of this as I will!
Adrian<br><br>Post edited by: adrian_m, at: 2008/07/07 11:03
