How to work with this odds archive

[Inkwell77]

So there is the odds archive here

http://www.sportsbookreviewsonline.com/scoresoddsarchives/ncaabasketball/ncaabasketballoddsarchives.htm

But when you download the file there are some steps you have to take to work with the data.
I figured out the first step (there are spaces after many of the numbers), you have to highlight the numbers, go to the find & select key under the home tab. Click find and then type with your number pad - alt 0160.

That changes most of the data and it mostly works.

But then there are certain numbers that are in fraction form that I can't figure out how to convert. If anyone uses these odds archives or knows how to help with this problem that would be awesome.

Thanks!

[benjy]

Hopefully someone will help you if you want to stay in excel.

I'd break away from excel and use some other language, in my case Python. Excel files are easily convertible into dictionaries using Python's csvDictReader. Once in a dictionary you can do whatever you like with the data (convert fractions, check for integrity, compare against another dataset, etc.), even throw it back into csv once you've played with it.

[Inkwell77]

Hopefully someone will help you if you want to stay in excel.

I'd break away from excel and use some other language, in my case Python. Excel files are easily convertible into dictionaries using Python's csvDictReader. Once in a dictionary you can do whatever you like with the data (convert fractions, check for integrity, compare against another dataset, etc.), even throw it back into csv once you've played with it.

Yeah, I think I should.
Would you recommend any book or program to start? I have the next three weeks off so I have a lot of free time to learn something.

My background in programming is two classes in college, so very little.
This season I used bbstate and would export the files to excel to work with it (until the site went down a couple months ago......)

I was looking into cbb reference today and I know there are way better ways (and sites) to scrape to get more of what I would like.

[benjy]

I'm biased but I'd learn Python. If you're looking for a general purpose, friendly, well-documented, language that employers are looking for in 2016 it's a great choice.

Rather than a book I'd recommend Udacity's Intro to Computer Science https://www.udacity.com/course/intro...science--cs101

It's free and by the end of it you build a rudimentary search engine - largely the same skills you'll need to scrape data.

[HeeeHAWWWW]

If you're not from a computer programming background, I'd go with R rather than Python. It's much easier to make workable for a beginner, and the weaknesses (neural nets spring to mind) won't constrain you for a long time in the future, if ever.