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Export lap times to CSV

Has there been an update of the lap time export function? Up to last week, it worked satisfactorily, with a lay-out to open it correctly in Excel with European decimal & thousands separators.

Now, when opened in Excel several lines are missing, and when opened with notepad, the lay-out shows the data between " and a lot of spaces in the values:

before:

after:

Why to change a winning team... ?

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

Yes, as I wrote, the white-space and a line-breaks are there certainly by mistake, and I guess they will be removed at the next revision. In the meantime you can strip them easily by search & replace.

If you want to fix it for your macro, simply search & replace all white-space and quotes after the header. You will get identical format as previously. Better yet, include the search & replace operation into your macro.

0 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to trux

Yes, I know

0 AllanOlesen67 over 5 years ago in reply to trux

trux said:
I guess because Excel often misinterpreted time formats when the time values were not quoted.

If that was the intention, they have made it worse with this change.

In the old format, hours were always included for any time or pace information, even if the duration was less than an hour. This is unambiguous:

00:07:27

In the new format, they have removed the hours from any time or pace values of less than an hour:

"7:27".

This is ambiguous. There is no way to see if it is minutes:seconds or hours:minutes. Unfortunately, my Excel 2013 will take the wrong guess and interpret it as hours:minutes, which is wrong.

(It doesn't help that Excel seems to have a bug: It ignores that I set " as the text qualifier during .csv import. This should force Excel to treat the contents between "" as text, but it still parses all time and value strings in the Garmin .csv file.)

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to AllanOlesen67

That's exactly why I recommended OpenOffice Calc. When you are opening a CSV file in OpenOffice Calc, you can select not only the delimiter, encoding, and quotes, but you can also set the data type of each column exactly as you wish. Just click the header of the table in the opening dialogue, and select the right type. In the imported table you can then adjust the column formatting even more precisely.

0 AllanOlesen67 over 5 years ago in reply to trux

trux said:
That's exactly why I recommended OpenOffice Calc.

Yes, you have a workaround. I would rather have a solution.

Garmin using an unambiguous time format in their .csv files would be a solution.

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to AllanOlesen67

If you want another solution (or call it workaround), you can open the csv file in Notepad (before opening in Excel), first search & replace the extra white-space and line-breaks, and then replace all strings ," (comma+double-quote) with the same string + blank space (comma+double-quote+space) . In this way Excel will not attempt to assign any numeric or time formats on any columns except the first, that we do not care about. Just tested it with Excel 2013

0 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to trux

Hi all,

I experienced the same as Jannie:

From one day to next day the exported format changed.

I jused data export for 3 Years with no problem at all. Something must have changed to worse from Garmin. I do not understand that we should use workaround for something that has chnaged from a perfect exported format to what it is now.

Strange!

Cheers

Hendrik

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

something that has chnaged from a perfect exported format

It was perhaps perfect for you, but there were many complaints from others, so that may be the reason of the modification. I am not telling that the current solution is perfect, just trying to explain why it is so.

0 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to trux

Hi Trux,

OK! Many others is a good point.

But is always difficult to change an export file format to something new...

I will find my way to cope. with the change. e.g. change to lap in the activity view mode under the graphs of the activity - then export. That format is far easier to translate to something similar to the old format.

:o)

I am still annyoed - but as I said: will find my way.

Cheers

Hendrik

0 trux over 5 years ago

Today, I have found another workaround that allows you using the CSV file directtly with Excel, without any need of reformatting or editing. You just need to copy the activity numeric ID from the URL line, when you are on the screen of the concerned activity, and then calling the following URL in the browser:

https://connect.garmin.com/proxy/download-service/export/csv/activity/NNNNNN (where the NNNNNN is the numeric id of the activity)

In this way, unlike at the export through the menu of the activity, you will download the CSV file with laps containing non-rounded values, and that greatly helps Excel with assigning the right formats to individual columns. All lap times will be including milliseconds (thousands of a second) and hence will format correctly in Excel too.