I have noticed a lot of posters struggling to make their statistical listings legible on the BBS. It's really quite simple, although it takes a little more effort. As an example, I'll use LA's #1 Rocket Fan's predictions for the year. <pre> Name Pts Reb Asst Blk Min Steve Francis 21 7 7 40 Moochie Norris 5 3 20 Cuttino Mobley 20 5 2 40 Glen Rice 14 4 27-32 Walt Williams 5 2 12-15 Dan Langhi 5 2 15-17 Terence Morris 3 5-7 Maurice Taylor 15 6 32 Kenny Thomas 6 6 22-25 Eddie Griffin 7 5 1.5 18-22 Kevin Cato 7 6 2 25 Jason Collier 4 3 12-15 --------------- ----- ---- ---- --- ------- T O T A L S 112.0 46.0 12.0 3.4 268-290 LAST YEAR 97.2 41.6 21.2 4.4 241.8 </pre></pre><p> The first thing you'll notice (aside from the fact that he has us scoring almost 15 ppg more than last year, possibly because of a large number of overtime games ) is that all the columns line up. How did I do this? With a combination of the "FONT" tag and the "pre" tag. Everything between < pre > and < /pre > is formatted in "preformatted" mode, telling the browser to allow long lines and multiple spaces. So I was able to produce the above chart by pasting LA's interesting post into a word processor, cutting everything except the stats, formatting it as Courier 12 (so I could see the columns lining up), and then copying and pasting into this post. It was all a mess until I added the pre and font tags. Once those were in place, everything lined up again. So the columnar data began with [ SIZE=3][ FONT=courier new]< pre> and ended with < /pre>[ /FONT][ /SIZE] (Note: I added spaces after the brackets to make them appear as text instead of being interpreted as HTML. Remove them before use. And do not trust my addition; I did it in my head.) This has been a public service announcement.
As always Owl, your attention to detail when attempting to improve our pathetic lack of knowledge in these things is overwhelming. Personally I am just going to send all my stats to your house and let you do it for me.
rice, if you use an html table, your table will be columnar, you won't have to use a fixed width font, and perhaps your text won't fly out of your post td.
True, but who wants to hand code a table? Of course, you could use a wysiwyg editor and copy/paste the code. But then, people don't do that, either... O.P., don't be obsequious. But keep the stats coming! A., I don't know why the text flew off the screen in your browser. It looks right in mine.
wys is wy deserve. lol i haven't found a wysiwyg that doesn't add a bunch of bunk metadata into your pages, personally. I also code servlets, so after a few base classes, my code is completely reusable and I don't have to type the html too much. I still end up doing so for demos(for myself) and stats(that I do on this site), but it's fairly methodical after a while... so you don't have to worry about "it being too much work" or anything. Plus, the tables look good. Play w/ a couple of cool bgcolors and some cellspacing and you can make some streamlined aesthetically pleasing tables.
Keep in mind folks, Achebe is a programmer dweeb... he doesn't know that the rest of the world doesn't really want to screw around with HTML tables.
On a related note, I was trying the other day to cut and paste Glen Rice's stats off NBA.com on to an Excel spreadsheet so I could play with some of the numbers. I was thinking of working out the standard deviation of his 3pt shots last year to get a little sense of exactly how "consistent" he was last year, and maybe fiddling around with other stats. However, Excel read the 3ptM/3ptA column (e.g. 2-4) as February 4th. Anyone know of a good way of feeding stats from NBA.com or another source into Excel or application of choice? Obviously, I could input each of the figures from all 82 games, but you guys will have to forgive me for looking for a better, less tedious way.
thanks DUD. Relativist, if you click on the header for that column (selecting the entire column) and then click format--cells you should be able to change the data type for that col. from 'general' (which calls it like it sees it) to some sort of text type. Good luck!
Achebe, thanks for the tip. But if I turn the numbers into text, I won't be able to perform any calculations, right? That's still probably the best way to go, since it's not too much trouble to re-type the numbers in another column as long as I don't have to be flipping back and forth between windows. But I feel like there must be a better way.
No...the first thing I noticed is that you didn't use line breaks properly with the < pre > tag. You are scrolling off the page. The second thing I noticed is that the Rockets scored 107.4 ppg on a player-cummulative average basis...10 more points per game than our team average last year. So, actually, LA only has us increasing by 5 ppg. Player-cummulative averages are always significantly higher than team scoring average--especially on team that has an injury to a high scoring player.
Um, I've got just one thing to say. I really don't like to be this uptight, but I resisted posting it early today, and given the quality of posters in this thread, I just can't pass it up twice. I've never done this before, so here goes... <size=6><FONT face="impact" size=+3 color=firebrick><center> Wrong Forum </center></FONT> Damn that felt good....
When I used to use their stats to watch statistical trends in players, I created 2 more columns (for 3P and 3PA) that parsed out the values from the combined column. You can also use cbs.sportsline.com's stats if you want. They have it split out.
just do your tables in dreamweaver and copy the code over...it takes a few seconds to design awsome looking tables versus handcoding the tables for 20-30 minutes...you can be surpised on how beautiful tables can look with different background color/images, cellspacing, borders color/thickness, and cellpadding combinations...its so easy using dreamweaver with tables!
You missed the intent of the question... Dreamweaver is a $250-$300 package (barring thieves who pirate it). How many people 1) Care enough about HTML enough to actually do anything with it on this BBS. 2) Care enough about HTML/stats presentation enough to create tables in their posts 3) Care enough about creating tables on a bbs that they'd go out and purchase a $250-$300 package (barring thieves who pirate it)? ... and boy are we in the wrong forum now, or what?
Mmmmmmm, you can actually smell the geekiness in this thread! I used the Dialectizer on this thread with the "hacker" dialect and none of the words changed. Hmmm.
