Denny,
They are in their own folder on the ftp. He wants them all in one large
alphabetical order, not by year. Just one large file totally alphabetic. But
the pages are by year and then in alphabetical order. Each year is on a
page. If I pull them into Excel they will still not be the way he wants
them. Or even a PDF. They would still be by year.
Yes, I think they were probably created in Excel.
I am not sure why the site search does not fulfill what he wants. This has
been on the site for 10 years now. I came aboard in 2005 and this was put on
in 2002.
Sheila
-----Original Message-----
From: ohgen-bounces(a)rootsweb.com [mailto:ohgen-bounces@rootsweb.com] On
Behalf Of Denny Shirer
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 11:27 AM
To: ohgen(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: [OHGENWEB] contributor problem
It is pretty easy to take this data and extract it into a spreadsheet and
then create a searchable PDF. If you set up your site search index it should
be able to search within a PDF which might satisfy him.
Personally I think the page is pretty ugly with the missing borders on empty
cells. That is something that can be corrected easily in the HTML by
inserting a "<br>" into the empty cells. Anything in there will force the
cell to draw it's borders. Whoever designed this probably had the data in a
spreadsheet and exported it into HTML format. Excel is notorious for
defaulting to leaving the cells empty when there is nothing to export which
ends up with the missing borders. If you copy all the data on the page and
copy it to your clipboard and then past it into an empty spreadsheet, it
will automatically align the rows and columns. You can then print or export
to a PDF and replace the page link with the PDF. When in the PDF you would
have to use the normal search method or rely on your site search to point to
the file.
You already have a Search tool on the site, how is this not fulfilling his
need to make the information searchable? You shouldn't have to change the
format if all he wants is to be able to search his data separate from the
rest if the site. You could also put these pages in their own directory and
create a new Search tool that just searches that directory and will return a
pointer to the data. That may satisfy him.
Since your a neighbor of my county, Muskingum, I'll help any way I can.
Dale's not the only one who can help!
Denny Shirer - drdx(a)neo.rr.com - Canton, OH Shirer Family Genealogy -
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mysong
Muskingum County, OHGenWeb -
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohmuskin/