[Gingervitis]

What's the best way to import live odds into an Excel spreadsheet? I'm currently using Web Queries linked up to the XML Feeds from a couple of sites. This kind of stuff is very new to me so I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing or if there's a better way to do this. Anyone have any tips?

[Ganchrow]

It really depends on in what language you feel you most comfortable coding.

I personally HATE VBA so what I do is code all my lines retrieval scripts in an external language and then when necessary just open a blocking shell process from VBA, calling the relevant scripts, and then writing to temporary files. Then I'll read in the temporary file and write to the relevant cells. As long as all my scripts output in standard format it's basically just plug and play for whatever I need.

Of course I try to do as little as possible in Excel, which might not be the case for you.

[Gingervitis]

I'm basically trying to do everything in Excel because I don't know anything else, though I figured there must be a better way. What language would you recommend for someone learning from scratch?

[Ganchrow]

If you haven't programmed before then you're probably best off just using VBA.

[Gingervitis]

Is there a way I can pull the lines directly from sbrodds or is linking the XML feeds the only way to go? And if I have to go the XML route, is there anywhere I can find a list of all the XML links for all sites or do I need to continue asking each site individually for their link?

[Ganchrow]

Is there a way I can pull the lines directly from sbrodds or is linking the XML feeds the only way to go? And if I have to go the XML route, is there anywhere I can find a list of all the XML links for all sites or do I need to continue asking each site individually for their link?

You could pull the lines from the sbrodds XML feed, but that would be an undocumented, unsupported usage, which would require you to hunt through the code on your own.

I'm aware of no centralized listing of XML feeds. I personally find most books' XML feeds to be quite slow (when they even have them), and typically just parse the HTML on my own.