combining statistical sites with different team name/mnemonics?

[gojetsgomoxies]

hoping people can give me general advice...

i use a bunch of statistical/power rating sites. they all seem to use different codes for team names. Mass, UMass, Masssachusits sp? and perhaps.

anyway advice on dealing with them.... i'm thinking of lookup tables in excel, but i'm wondering if sites (say teamrankings.com, masseyratings.com, statfox.com etc.) are at least consistent over time with their abbreviations (lots of teams it's not problem. florida, idaho etc.. but many teams it is a problem)

thanks in advance. don't think there's really any way around it..

i guess one thing i can do is build look up tables for each website..... i was thinking more of combining the amazing info from many sites

[Insoluble]

Use the "Find and Replace" function in Excel to change the variant names to one name. This would work well if you need a one time change to your list of teams.

If its an evolving and constantly updating list of teams you might be better of creating a lookup table and using Vlookup to create a uniform naming convention for your teams in a separate column.

[brettd]

I have a VLOOKUP table with over 5500 name variants for different colleges.

Good luck with it all.

[gojetsgomoxies]

thanks guys...

fyi, want to combine tons of sites (pain) ..... and segment teams by conference (alot of work upfront but should generally be easy)

thx again!

[gojetsgomoxies]

one follow-up, if i may....

i seem to now be having troubles bringing statfox team report and teams stats into microsoft excel..

no matter how i paste it (text, unicode etc.), the columns turn out funny. "arkansas" takes up one column, but "arkansas state" takes up two columns, which means that yards per carry (for example) aren't in the same column for every team.

somewhat stangely if i "paste special" as text it makes it into columns (bad ones) too.

normal paste puts all the info for 126 teams in one cell.

any neat tricks i can learn??

thanks again... p.s. these problems are intermittant, had them before and then miraculously (it seemed), they cleared up

[gojetsgomoxies]

alright, i think "istext()" function is my friend... bit of a pain, but oh well.

[EXhoosier10]

one follow-up, if i may....

i seem to now be having troubles bringing statfox team report and teams stats into microsoft excel..

no matter how i paste it (text, unicode etc.), the columns turn out funny. "arkansas" takes up one column, but "arkansas state" takes up two columns, which means that yards per carry (for example) aren't in the same column for every team.

somewhat stangely if i "paste special" as text it makes it into columns (bad ones) too.

normal paste puts all the info for 126 teams in one cell.

any neat tricks i can learn??

thanks again... p.s. these problems are intermittant, had them before and then miraculously (it seemed), they cleared up

neat trick: learn a programming language (eg Python -- use beautifulsoup)

[gojetsgomoxies]

neat trick: learn a programming language (eg Python -- use beautifulsoup)

that's like real work though ...... in all seriousness, thank you.... pretty sure i should too as i come upon similar issues in stock market trading backtesting too.