Ability to download to Excel

Nick,

Where do we find the CB Query field? Our goal is a user friendly method for our secretary obviously.

I sent you a personal email about the potential for writing a plugin for this export function.

Stan

To add energy to the request to be able to download data from CBSubs: At Ashland Farm we re-enter every member of CB Subs into a data base (Filemaker) simply to be able to do the finds and sorts we need to track our membership in the ways we need to. It is very time consuming, frustrating, and expensive for us to do this.

When I am asked about the software we use for our membership I discuss CBSubs. Of course I list all that makes it a great software option for us. But I almost always discuss the limitation imposed by not being able to manipulate the data to our needs, and not being able to download the data to use Excel to manipulate the data.

I do find it surprising - so many huge, successful companies (for example, 2 that we use, Quickbooks and Filemaker, both build in the ability to download to Excel. It seems an odd blindspot for an otherwise excellent Joomla component.

spletcher wrote: Don't you all have some plugin like CB Juice or something that could be tweaked to do this?

We're not the developers of CB Juice.

spletcher wrote: Where do we find the CB Query field? Our goal is a user friendly method for our secretary obviously.

It'd just output a comma list from your own custom database query. Excel supports importing comma list of data and is what Nick was suggesting. In short you'd need to write the query and have it output as a comma list using CB Query Field, which you'd then copy the comma list of data to an Excel document. I think you're thinking too much in regards to a manual scope. If you're just moving data from 1 location to another then automate it entirely so you don't need to even export as it's just automatically handled by the system.

spletcher wrote: I sent you a personal email about the potential for writing a plugin for this export function.

We are not planning on writing a plugin for this anytime soon, sorry. The export functionality we're planning would extend core CB API and work for all backend table views (ideally would also work for importing too).

lcalhoun wrote: To add energy to the request to be able to download data from CBSubs: At Ashland Farm we re-enter every member of CB Subs into a data base (Filemaker) simply to be able to do the finds and sorts we need to track our membership in the ways we need to. It is very time consuming, frustrating, and expensive for us to do this.

You maybe able to automate this. You can push data from CBSubs to internal/external databases using CBSubs SQL Actions or for greater control using CB Auto Actions.

lcalhoun wrote: When I am asked about the software we use for our membership I discuss CBSubs. Of course I list all that makes it a great software option for us. But I almost always discuss the limitation imposed by not being able to manipulate the data to our needs, and not being able to download the data to use Excel to manipulate the data.

You can download the data using phpmyadmin. Create a custom query, bookmark it, and it's 1 click to run it and 1 click to export it. We will eventually have export functionalities which will just export the table of data you see in the backend views. The idea is this functionality would just be a part of core CB API so it can work on any backend tables, but we haven't even started the process of developing this sorry. There's probably a lot more ways to even automate this with custom coding in combination with CB Auto Actions, but you need to be familiar with PHP and SQL (e.g. automate parsing SQL into an excel file and dumping it into a folder daily via CRON).

lcalhoun wrote: I do find it surprising - so many huge, successful companies (for example, 2 that we use, Quickbooks and Filemaker, both build in the ability to download to Excel. It seems an odd blindspot for an otherwise excellent Joomla component.

Doesn't seam fair to compare us, a small team of 3, to a multi billion dollar company like Quickbooks. FileMaker is a sub company of Apple, which again is a multi billion dollar company. I can't even imagine what I'd do with billions of dollars and a 100+ person team, but I can certainly imagine we'd have export functionality a long time ago if we did. As I've explained though export functionality is planned, but I've no idea when.

I had no idea there were only three of you behind CBSubs!

I will ask the person who helps with our web IT issues to look at your suggestions. Maybe we can put something together.

Thanks!