Why I didn't sign up/One question

[Bruce]

Getting a free month of HTR was great, thank you very much for all of your help, Ken and Rick

The question: can you take the Prat figures and import them into an Excel file to do some basic math calucations?

The fact that I never had time to post a single play tells you all the reasons why I did not
sign up for the service. This is an excellent service -- great customer help, figures as good as anywhere (with the exception of final time Ragozins but if you're hand-timing grass races and accounting for different run-ups at the different distances and tracks, that's pretty damn precise.)

I just never found the time to do any kind of comprehensive research or handicapping.
The people on this board who have made it work have worked hard and spent many hours so they could come up with quick, spot plays and my hats off to all of them.
I would take printouts on the train to study whether they could fit in with my method of play and fall asleep. And I never could find the time to automate everything so I could find plays quickly.

So, Ken, my not signing up has everything to do with my ridiculous work, get home at 8 p.m., 2-year-old daughter, very little time for much else lifestyle, and nothing to do with this fine service.
But now that I have more than a month of files when I have time I can play with them and have some fun.

Good luck to all,

Bruce

[Ken Massa]

Thanks for the nice commentary and honest appraisal Bruce. Your life is a whirlwind - hope things will slow down and you can get some time to handicap. Maybe you can join our next contest and win another free month in January!

The PRAT figures are exportable as a print-to-file only. Maybe others have worked with them in apps such as Excel or text editors could comment - I know Dr Larry makes his own changes, but maybe by hand. A comma-delimited export of all the pp data from PRAT(2) would be cumbersome and a massive amount of data with a large cache of races. I have avoided full pp data exports for other reasons including the fact that they would not be that useful for research with so much raw information to process.

An export of basic data + each horse's complete 'sheet' numbers could be a custom software project if you want to contact me in the future about commissioning that work.

best of luck and hope you will chime in here often

[tbrown]

Don't know if you can use Pratt file too easily, but you can print the PP's to a text file, then import it into Excel - just select where you want your columns to be - an d you will lose some data that doesn't line up, but you can get the date, r#, track, par, pace and final figures of the race and of the horse and the race shape. I set up a spreadsheet like this to find horse that are coming out of races where the pace was 4 points above par and the final fog was 6 points above par. Idea was to fond horse coming out of exceptionally fast races that might be key races.