That may be true, I don't think I've personally made a purchase from either of them. I'm familiar with Black Border through some friends who swear by their pricing accuracy, and AdventuresOn was recommended to me by Kelly. The lists looked to same to me as well, but I thought one might be a copy cat. I'll check into it and fix the spread sheets to account for the duplication if there is an issue. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

@Lackey

That is definitely something I am looking to do eventually, and I'd like to take it further as well. I'm a bit limited by my programming knowledge, so I need to get that going first and then I'll be able to build some tools. I might be able to get some help in building these kinds of tools before then, but for now we'll have my spreadsheets.

Is there any chance of this evolving into an on-demand queryable list where we'd be able to quickly get the highest store buy price across all included stores? (And could the aggregator sites, bidwicket.com and allmagiccards.com be tapped as additional data sources?)

Spent a good deal of time yesterday trying to learn some of this advanced excel stuff. I figured out how to get the external web data to the spreadsheet & auto updating, but I've hit a wall as to using the data how I want to/ using formulas in my spread sheet. I never thought getting into Magic would involve learning Excel. 🙂

This is going to be a challenge for me. I think my head might asplode. Time to check out Excel 2007 books from the library!!

@Windle

sounds good. I know a few people that are python coders, but someone with code doing exactly some of what i'm looking to do would be good. BTW, pulling down the data is pretty quick, maybe a minute or two to grab around 178,000 lines of text, it's the sorting that takes all the real time. I think though that the vlookup and index functions are linear so the time is not at all efficient. There is a lot to parse and filter. I could probably rewrite it to be more economical, but thinking of doing so makes me want to spend the time on Python.

Thank you, I was just curious as I began thinking about programmatically accessing this data. I have been looking for a pet development project and would like to give this a try since I am actively trying to liquidate old cards.

@coveredinbees

I didn't ask permission since they are online buy lists and they probably don't feel too bad about someone sending business their way… As for pulling down the data, it's all Excel.

@D-Roy

Nearly everything I learned about Excel was from the help files. Took a while, but I got there. One thing that makes this kind of work a little easier is the Index/Match style lookups.

May I call you Windle? Ok good.
@Windle

I'm still learning Python so that I'll be able to ditch the current method, but right now it's all done entirely in MS Excel. My main spread sheet for this data is about 65MBs and takes about an hour to update. That's not me entering data, that's just for formulas crunching away after the new data has been pulled down.

SGC's layout was a bit of an issue, but since the information stays in the same place (vertically) I just sorted the lookup tables into 3 separate series of columns, checked for the set names based on the position of the word "Card," ran the set names through a lookup table to convert them to something usable and filtered out the ones I don't want to check (like foils or promo card).

I can't wait to learn how to use something with more power.

I'm trying to get better at creating spreadsheets and analysis like this, but I've got alot to learn. I'm way behind Michael Poon – I've got no idea how to automatically pull info from a website. 🙂