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| paulberg 7/18/2004 14:00:14 [ report this post ] |
 Subject: Looking for Computer Geeks for PGN Game Analysis!?Message: Does anyone know how to download PGNs to an excel spreadsheet for data analysis and query? Any help would be great! I am looking to sort my favorite openings and defenses to see how well I am really doing with them against similar rated opponents without manually going through my entire game history. pauL |
| groove 7/18/2004 14:29:23 [ report this post ] | Message: VBA, java, or even say vbscript would work fine for extraction of the data. I would recommend building a database though opposed to an excel spreadsheet. Do you have any programming experience? If not, then no it wouldn't be easy unless there is an app out there that will do this. |
| paulberg 7/18/2004 16:06:53 [ report this post ] | VBA? Message: I do have Microsoft Access (simple database software), would that work? And, what is VBA? I do know that Excel will import *.txt files. Would I be able to convert or import the PGN files to simple text files? pauL |
| soikins 7/19/2004 02:12:22 [ report this post ] | paulberg Message: I'm not a computer geek, but maybe I can suggest something. First of all, you could simply use ChessBase or some other Chess database software that can sort your Openings and calculate statistics, create your Opening books etc. a .pgn file can be easely edited and saved with Notepad. Simply open it, edit and save or save as .txt file if you want to open it with Excel. Thought, you will need to do some work if you want to turn that .txt file into a table. For example via Word processor by replacing all spaces with tabs. Then you can convert text to table and copy the table to Excel or Access. P.S. I really don't get the point of all this. Buy ChessBase or try the open source SCID, there should be some nice features. |
| dysfl 7/19/2004 11:36:55 [ report this post ] | Time to move out of Excel Message: paulberg, Maybe you can try to be more specific what you want to achieve by processing the pgns. First, as a slightly lower strength level at around 1470, I dare say why bother? I�d rather spend my time to analyze my games to improve my favorite lines than building a DB about games between intermediate players. More than half of my games are won/lost by blunders, not by opening lines or tactical moves. The statistics given by GK is enough for me. Second, you can use Fritz and create a new DB with all your downloaded pgns. You can group them by openings. By building this personal games DB, you can search a specific position from the previous games. However, I doubt again if you can add enough games into the DB, to be useful. I�d rather buy a games-collection CD. I tried to build my own game DB, but soon found that I�ve been collecting all the blunders instead of information. Third, I�ve used Excel a lot myself for simple DB some time ago as I started from Lotus 1-2-3. Excel has improved in DB functions over the years, but I don�t believe Excel could be more useful than any of the chess DB programs when managing chess games. |
| groove 7/19/2004 13:51:58 [ report this post ] | Message: If you don't have any programming experience, I truly reiterate everyone's suggestion of looking into a chess program to carry out these functions. I'm sure there's something out there that would do this. A .pgn file is nothing more than a text file with a specific formatted structure. You can open this in excel just fine, but you're not going to be able to manipulate the data very well without some programming. VBA is visual basic for applications and is the standard programming environment of most MS Office applications. VBscript is an interpreted scripting language that is built into Windows 2000/XP. Both languages have objects that can extract and sort data from a .pgn files and compile a related database, but again, unless you are familiar with these procedures, I would look into other chess programs to do this. |
| sharpnova 7/27/2004 22:35:58 [ report this post ] | computer geeks Message: since computers are the center of eveyrone's life nowadays.. i don't like the term computer geek. i think the proper term is non-idiot. i've met very few people in my life who were computer iliterate and NOT full-time effortless idiots. |
| snake_man 7/28/2004 05:30:27 [ report this post ] | might I recommend SCID? Message: This is a free program that sounds like it will do what you are trying to do, (show you how often you played x opening and how well you faired with it, etc.) and it will only cost you some download time (less than 3 MB). You can find it at scid.sourceforge.net/download.html . |
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