How to convert .XLS files in .CSV and viceversa?

XLS (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format)

Is a binary format used by Microsoft excel for storing data.

CSV ( Comma Separated Values )

Is a file format for storing data in text files. Every value are separated from other value by a delimiter (many times is , or ; ). Content of a CSV file looks like following lines:

Year;Make;Model;Length
1997;Ford;E350;2,34
2000;Mercury;Cougar;2,38

Convert XLS to CSV

This it’s very simple:

1. You need to open XLS (Excel spreadsheet) file with Microsoft Excel

2. Save as (from file or office menu)

3. Insert file name

4. Select CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv) from save as type ( above File name )

5, Press Save, then OK and Yes This is all.

Convert CSV to XLS file

1. You need to open CSV file with Microsoft Excel

2. Save as (from file or office menu)

3. Insert file name

4. Select Excel 97-2003 Workbook (*.xls) from save as type ( above File name )

5. Press Save This is all.

 

Web scraping in email marketing

Many businesses have difficulties to bring their products on their market. Often their market it’s easy to be defined. On a defined market you can easy research your competitors and your customers, and what it’s very valuable, you can find details about every potential customer and you can bring him an offer.

A real example:

If your business does cleaning solutions for swimming pools you may be interested by all contact details (contact person, phone number, email address, website) of hotels who have swimming pools near you or even in entire country. If you have this data you can do direct marketing or email marketing (sending services or product offer by email)

 

Why scraping and why TheWebMiner?

If you read this blog you are one of two things: you are either interested in web scraping and you have studied this domain for quite a while, or you are just curious about this relatively new field of interest and want to know what it is, how it’s done and especially why. Either way it’s fine!

In case you haven’t googled already this I can tell you that data extraction (or scraping) is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program (wikipedia). Basically it can collect all the information on a certain subject from certain places. It’s sort of the equivalent of ctrl+f, at the scale of the whole internet. It’s nothing like the search engines that we currently use because it can extract the data in a certain file, as excel, csv (coma separated values) or any other that the buyer wants, and also extracts only the relevant data, only the values that you are interested in.

I hope now that you understand the concept and you are wondering just why would you need such data. Well let’s take the example of an online store, pretty common nowadays, and of course the manager just like any manager wants his business to thrive, so, for that he has to keep up with the other online stores. Now the web scraping takes place: it is very useful for him to have, saved as excels all the competitor’s prices of certain products if not all of them. By this he can maintain a fair pricing policy and always be ahead of his competitors by knowing all of their prices and fluctuations.  Of course the data collecting can also be done manually but this is not effective because we are talking of thousand of products each one having its own page and so on. This is only one example of situation in which scrapping is useful but there are hundreds and each one of them it’s profitable for the company.

By now I’ve talked about what it is and why you should be interested in it, from now on I’m going to explain why you should use thewebminer.com. First of all, it’s easy: you only have to specify what type of data you want and from where and we’ll manage the rest. Throughout the project you will receive first of all an approximation of price, followed by a time approximation. All the time you will be in contact with us so you can find out at any point what is the state of your project. The pricing policy is reasonable and depends on factors like the project size or complexity. For very big projects a discount may be applicable so the total cost be within reason.

Now I believe that thewebminer.com is able to manage with any kind of situation or requirement from users all over the world and to convince you, free samples are available at any project you may have or any uncertainty or doubt.

AB test with Google Analytics

An AB test it’s a comparison between two versions of the same page (this testing method is often used in online marketing). With this type of test you can measure what version of a page produces more conversions.

Google Analytics has a powerful tool for AB testing. This tool does all parts of AB testing, including visit balancing over versions of pages (distributes visits to each page version), data registering, reporting and decision.

For doing an AB test with Google Analytics you need to do the following steps:

1. Build an alternative page for your original page (page you want to test it)

2. Registering this experiment in Google Analytics section Content/Experiment

3. Put the code of experiment only in the original version of page.

You can find more details here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?ref_topic=1745207&rd=1

RSS feeds on Kindle

When we created the tool for extract main article from a page, we wanted to get an entire article from an URL (URL taken  from RSS feed) not only excerpt.

We tested 4 RSS to Kindle delivery services and all of these are non-intuitive and paid services. This is the reason for we want to build a better service for this need.  Another problem it’s that the most of RSS feeds put on stream only an excerpt of article not entire article. For this reason we created a tool that you can use to extract the main article of a page.

We hope to announce soon an complete service that delivers valuable content on Kindle or another eBook reader.

A tool for main article extraction

Today we announce a new tool for extract main article from a webpage.

For example if we want to extract only article from this page: http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/03/cyprus-bail-out we put the URL in address field and press enter. It’s very simple 😉 .

The tool can be found here. Will lunch soon an free API for this tool.