Help with exporting completed AL observing logs

[jjones7777]

Can anyone tell me how to take a completed Skytools AL observing program and copy it so that it can be placed in a excel spreadsheet?  I'm attempting to arrange my H2 observations into a spreadsheet format but I have only been able to generate a paragraph-style word document.

I'm guessing this info is somewhere on the forum, but I can't seem to find it...

Thank you!

Jerry Jones

[theskyhound]

Can anyone tell me how to take a completed Skytools AL observing program and copy it so that it can be placed in a excel spreadsheet?  I'm attempting to arrange my H2 observations into a spreadsheet format but I have only been able to generate a paragraph-style word document.

I'm guessing this info is somewhere on the forum, but I can't seem to find it...

Thank you!

Jerry Jones

Hello Jerry,

Presumably you have found the Print/Copy Logs for Observing Award function on the List Functions menu. As you probably discovered, you can copy the observations to the clipboard. But its not in a format meant for a spreadsheet. As far as I know, a spreadsheet isn't what people usually turn in. 

That said, spreadsheets are very flexible when it comes to reading data. But I'm not really an expert in using spreadsheets, and it depends on which one you are using. The format that SkyTools generates is one line per item, starting with a tag and colon, and then the item. You can choose which items to include. For example:

Observing Log Entries for Moon
Date: 2022 January 3 18:12
Observer: Greg Crinklaw
Location: Cloudcroft, New Mexico
Instrument: Skyhound 18
Conditions: Good seeing

The textual description (which some people consider the actual log and others never fill out) is appended on the lines below these items, which makes it a lot harder to read into the spreadsheet. So if you can skip the description, there should be a way to read the rest into a spreadsheet. You'd need to ask an expert in your spreadsheet though. 

For those with light programming skills, it would be possible to feed an example of the format into an LLM, such as ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, or Gemini, and it can make a python (or other script) that would do the reformatting for you.

[aggregory]

Hi Jerry,

I have always submitted my logs in a spreadsheet format. That makes it easier to sort and edit as needed.

This is how to do it.

1. Under Tools, select Browse Logs to open the Log Browser dialog box.
2. In the lower right section of this box there are several buttons. Select Export to open the Export Obsering Logs dialog box.
3. In this box you can select the delimiter. I usually accept the "commas" default. In the middle section I click on the radio button for "All objects in this observing list" and select the observing list from which I want to export my logs. In the lower section, you can select wnat you want to include.
4. At the bottom, click on Export, enter a name for your file and where you want it to go. This creates a *.txt file.
5. Open your spreadsheet of choice and open or import this text file. I usually use LibreOffice Calc. It has a very good wizard for making sure the data is imported correctly. Excel works too.

Clear Skies,
Antone

[jjones7777]

That did it! Thanks Antone!