Data Tools

Car Show Helper Home

Projects Home

Data Tools Menu

Data tools menu contains tools that help organize, analyze and use your car show data.

Update Registration Info

There is no dialog box for Update Registration Info, but it does post the above warning.

Update Registration Info fills in missing Registration Contact Information data by comparing the Registration and Contacts tables.

Update Contact Info

There is no dialog box for Auto Update Contact Info, but it does post the above warning.

Registrants may have changed their contact information between shows. If a contact's first name and lastName are the same then replace the email, street, city, email, phone with the more recent non-blank data. Caution! A person's name may not be unique. For example A son named after his father may live at a different address. There is a society for people named "Jim Smith" .

Beautify Table

As shown in the figure, Beautify Table cleans up a show table for a neat appearance and proper data format. Excel-Paste overrides the formatting in a cell and can cause errors, for example when a number is pasted as a string. Beautify Table will fix most of these problems. Formatting addresses to USPS standards eliminates potential contacts duplicates, for example by changing Avenue, Ave. etc. to the standard "Ave". People are often inconsistent in how they write their address. These minor variations create essentially duplicate contacts entries.

Select a table to beautify and click OK.

Edit Show Table

The Edit Show Table dialog looks a lot like the CarShowTools>Registration dialog. The main difference is that it targets a selected registration or contacts table. "CarShowTools->Registration" searches the Contacts table and posts to the Registration table. Edit Show Table searches and posts to the selected target table. Edit Show Table is mainly used to add or correct data such as non-required contact information in a car show table. You can search the target table by car number or Last Name. There is usually a lot of contact data on paper day-of-show registration forms that can be added after the show. In the figure we are editing car 120 in the Registration table.

Mark Bad E-mail Addresses

Car Show Helper does not validate e-mail addresses. The email addresses provided by registrants are sometimes incorrect, illegible, blocked, or fail due to other reasons. Simple Mail Merge (below) can create a bulk e-mail list for your mailing package. The mailing package will usually return a list of invalid email addresses.

1. Copy the invalid email addresses to a columnar range of cells in a Car Show Helper sheet or in a separate workbook.
2. Run Mark Bad E-Mail Addresses
3. Click in the Range box at the right edge of the text box.
4. Use the mouse to select the invalid e-mail cells and click OK.
5. The invalid e-mails in the contacts list will be marked by a lovely shade of pink. Edit or delete them as needed.

Mark Possible Table Duplicates

Marks possible duplicates in the selected sheet with colors from pale yellow to pure red depending on the number of identical matching Year, Make, Model, Edition, First Name, and Last Name cells. Determining and deleting actual duplicates is left to the user. Check the Show Color Key to display a color key along with the marked duplicates. The Color Key can also be displayed by running its own menu item.

Run "Reset Sheet Colors" to remove the Marker colors.

Make Practice Data

Uses the active class table, in this example it is the Practice.ClassTab, to create in the Registration sheet the requested number of synthetic participants belonging to the PRACTICE club. Does not Assign judging points, see Simulate Votes below. Appending to existing registrants created with a different class table is not recommended.

Make Car Numbers

Legacy Tool. Just appends a bunch of car numbers to the Registration sheet. May save some annoying typing if you are adding registrations to the sheet manually without using the Registration Dialog.

Simulate Votes

Simulates votes/points based on the judging table. Overwrites any existing judging results. Useful in learning how Car Show Helper Tally works. You can make your own fictive shows using Make Practice Data and Simulate Votes. The votes are pseudo-random in that they attempt to mimic the point or vote statistics of a real show.,

Plot Travel Distances

Plot travel Distances creates a histogram of as-the-crow-flies distances between a registrants's Zip code and the Zip code for your show location (or any other Zip location). It tells how many people traveled how far to attend your show. It may useful in promoting your show to a potential sponsor or selecting a potential site for a show.

• Use Zip Code from: - Select a table containing the Zip codes for the distance measurement.
• Home Zip Code - A valid Zip code for your chosen location
• Number of Bins - chop the calculated distances into this many measurements. More bins increases noise, fewer bins decreases noise. Recommend a smaller number of bins for a small show.
• Plot title - self explanatory.
• Max Distance - put all of the distances greater than Max Distance into one bin. For example, if 300 cars come from within 50 miles and one car comes from 2000 miles, and there are 20 bins, then there will be 100 miles/bin. All of the cars will be in the 0-100 mile bin and one car will be in the 2000 mile bin. Setting Max bin to 50 will give 19 bins between 0 and 50 miles and 1 bin for any car greater than 50 miles.
• Show Plot in new Sheet - self explanatory.

The plot shows that about 50% of registrants in this practice show traveled about 900 miles or less. Real shows will probably have much shorter travel distances.

Print Dash Cards

Most shows use dash cards to identify each car for judging. Print Dash Cards creates a simple dash card for each registered car in a formatted Excel sheet named "Print then Delete". Use Excel's Print Previewer to view the draft output. Delete the page after printing.

• Use for pre-registered cars to print cards in advance of the show.
• For day of show registrants use the "Print Dash Card" checkBox in the Registration form.
• Two Dash Cards fit on an 8.5x11 page in portrait format.
• Car Show Title - This title will appear on the Dash Card.

The show title and essential judging data are on the Dash Card. Owner information is limited to city, state and club affiliation.

Print Registration Slips

Many shows use a portion of a paper show flyer as a registration slip. Print Registration Slips provides some compatability with the paper registration process by creating paper slips for paperless on-line registered cars in a formatted Excel sheet named "Print then Delete". Use Excel's Print Previewer to view the draft output. Delete the page after printing.

• Print in Serial order - Car numbers increase in the downward page direction.
• Print Ordered for Cutting - Car numbers increase in the page direction. For example, at 7 slips per page, 70 cars will need 10 pages to print. The first car will be at the top of page 1, the second car will be at the top of page 2 etc. Car 11 will be in the second row on page 1, car 12 will be in the second row on page 2 etc. If you put the ten sheets in a paper cutter and slice off the top row, the cars on the cut slips will be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
• Number of slips per page - self explanatory

The registration slips were printed in cut order, 7 slips per page requiring 15 pages for all of the slips in our make-believe show. Car 100 is in the top row. Car 101 is in the top row on the second page etc. Slicing off the top row gives slips for cars 100 to 114. Car 115 is in the second row on the first page.

Append Tables

Append Tables appends the columns of a source table to the associated columns of a destination table. The source table can be any excel table with column headers. "city", "state", "zip" in the figure are examples of column headers. The figure shows a typical use, importing the subscriber data collected by an on-line registration website (in this case a Joomla CMS back-end report) into the "Contacts" sheet using the following steps:

1. Use Excel tools to copy your data into a new workbook. Use Copy/Paste, open a csv file etc.
2. If necessary, add column headers to each column.
3. If the data is not in an Excel table, convert it to a table by clicking a cell in the data. Select Excel's INSERT tab and click the "Table" icon. A dialog will appear with the data range automatically selected and the "My table has headers" checked. Click OK. Excel will show the Table Tools in the ribbon. Note the default name of the new table shown in the ribbon. You can change it if you like.
4. Run Append Tables
5. Select your table from the Source Table pull-down list. A list of source table headers will appear in the Src columns list.
6. Select a table from the Destination Table pull-down list. A list of destination table headers will appear in the Dest col list.
7. Select a column in the Src Columns list.
8. Select a column in the Dest Col list.
9. Click the Src "Associate" button to associate the source and destination columns.
10. Repeat the selection and Src Associate steps until all of the columns you need are associated.
11. Click OK. The selected data in the Source Table will be appended to the associated column in the DestinationTable

Simple Mail Merge

Simple Mail Merge creates a new workbook containing a filtered list of of contact information for bulk e-mail, USPS mail, or both.

• Data Source - pull-down list of Car Show Registration, Contacts, and Archive tables.
• Max Age (yrs) - ignore contacts older than Max Age. If they haven't been to your show in 10 years you may want to delete the contact.
• Exclude Your Club - Optional, select a club. Don't waste resources sending messages to you own people?
• Filter List by Car Make - Check the Makes who's owners you want to contact. The example in the figure will list only GM owners.
• Remove Duplicates - Recommended.
• List Options - Select at least one - Include e-mail, Include Address, Include Phone.

Car Show Helper Home

Projects Home