can anyone tell me if there is a site where you can check the historic prices of tennis players. i know you can check how low a horses price hits but just wondered if this was possible on tennis players.
thanks stewarty
historic prices
Hi,
I have a couple of questions.
Once I have downloaded the data and opened it in excel it comes up with an error data not fully loaded. The US & Aus races are but I can't see any UK races.
Also does anyone have a excel or something written which displays these better etc which they don't mind sharing.?
Thanks
Jimmy
I have a couple of questions.
Once I have downloaded the data and opened it in excel it comes up with an error data not fully loaded. The US & Aus races are but I can't see any UK races.
Also does anyone have a excel or something written which displays these better etc which they don't mind sharing.?
Thanks
Jimmy
Jimmy,
The reason that you are getting the error message is that the file you have opened contains more rows than can be accomodated in an excel workbook. I think that there are approx 1.7 million rows in a 1 week data file and that is beyond the capability of most versions of excel, certainly up to excel 2003 (65,536 rows) and I think more than excel 2007 can cope with (1 million ?).
You can import it as a text/csv file to a database such as ms access. However, you will need to clean up the data and filter for selected sports etc. The raw data definitely needs cleansing as there are inconsistent pieces of data due to the way it was loaded onto Betfair. When the csv file is created it sometimes truncates the data at points it should not.
However, once the data is cleansed then it is usable and you can derive decent info from it.
Regards
dog
The reason that you are getting the error message is that the file you have opened contains more rows than can be accomodated in an excel workbook. I think that there are approx 1.7 million rows in a 1 week data file and that is beyond the capability of most versions of excel, certainly up to excel 2003 (65,536 rows) and I think more than excel 2007 can cope with (1 million ?).
You can import it as a text/csv file to a database such as ms access. However, you will need to clean up the data and filter for selected sports etc. The raw data definitely needs cleansing as there are inconsistent pieces of data due to the way it was loaded onto Betfair. When the csv file is created it sometimes truncates the data at points it should not.
However, once the data is cleansed then it is usable and you can derive decent info from it.
Regards
dog
The early files are comma delimited, but also have commas in some of the fields... 
The later files are comma delimited with quotation marks around each field to avoid the confusion.
If you don't know how to clean up the earlier data just use the 2009 data.
Just to make things interesting once you sort out the importing from different formats of csv there are also some duplicate rows occasionally so you may need to watch out for duplicate keys in your database and handle that when importing
Excel 2007 will open the files, but your best bet as already mentioned is to import into a database. MS SQL Server Express is free and way better/faster than Access, but if you don't know SQL then Access will be much easier to use.
The later files are comma delimited with quotation marks around each field to avoid the confusion.
If you don't know how to clean up the earlier data just use the 2009 data.
Just to make things interesting once you sort out the importing from different formats of csv there are also some duplicate rows occasionally so you may need to watch out for duplicate keys in your database and handle that when importing
Excel 2007 will open the files, but your best bet as already mentioned is to import into a database. MS SQL Server Express is free and way better/faster than Access, but if you don't know SQL then Access will be much easier to use.
Following on from "Cran's" reference to SQL Server, it is a much better option than ms access for larger numbers of historical data files as ms access has a file size limitation of 2gb (up to 2003, not sure about 2007+).
If you are planning on downloading a lot of the weekly historical data files then it does not take long before you are getting to the ms access file size capacity. However, if you strip out your selected sport and do a bit of housekeeping then you can get a years worth of data into an access database.
I think that the switch over point to using the comma delimited quotation mark files was the middle of July 2008 so less cleansing on files after that date.
Regards
dog
If you are planning on downloading a lot of the weekly historical data files then it does not take long before you are getting to the ms access file size capacity. However, if you strip out your selected sport and do a bit of housekeeping then you can get a years worth of data into an access database.
I think that the switch over point to using the comma delimited quotation mark files was the middle of July 2008 so less cleansing on files after that date.
Regards
dog