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Download Activity format has changed without notification

PeterMcAnaney

I use the 'Export CSV' feature on the Activities Page to download my Bike Rides. I upload this CSV into my Excel Tracker automatically.

The automatic VBA routine picks out the fields I need from the CSV file. e.g. Date, Ride Distance, Aver Speed, etc.etc.

Has worked fine for years. However from time to time the data field position format changes form time to time. i.e. Reverting from one format to the original and the reverting back after another few months.

I now have two routines handling both formats but I only find out it has changed when my upload goes wrong. Am I doing something wrong? How can I avoid this?

  • 0

    I can't speak to this exact problem, but I will say that the export feature for running lap splits produces inconsistent output too. E.g. some split times will look like "4:12" while others will look like "4:12.0". Both of these are meant to signify 4 minutes and 12 seconds, but Excel will interpret the former as 4 hours and 12 minutes and the latter as 4 minutes and 12 seconds, which means that when both of these formats are used in the output, it becomes impossible to do math such as averaging without manually fixing the data.

    I guess my point is that I don't think you're doing anything wrong, and it isn't surprising to me that Garmin's output format is inconsistent.

  • 0 in reply to flowstate

    Here's some alternatives:

    - export activities as FIT (original format). But it's a lot more work to parse these files, as it's binary data

    - use the free site https://www.runalyze.com to automatically sync activities from your Connect account. runalyze has an option to export all activity (summary) data as CSV

  • 0 in reply to flowstate

    In my work, I'm constantly exporting data in csv format from several systems from different manufacturers. And unfortunately it's not just Garmin. Every system I use has sudden changes in the csv format at unpredictable times. Either it's the field order, or field labelling, or time format, or date format, or...

    My guess is that csv export is such a niche need that companies just dump the data in whatever the default format is, and that can change when libraries, databases, etc. are updated.

  • 0 in reply to Bitti

    Yeah it doesn’t help that the data that’s exported is subject to interpretation by Excel (or Numbers, Google Sheets, whatever), as in the lap time/pace example I mentioned. Sometimes this can be mitigated by quoting, other times not.

    I’ve def worked on projects where devs just guess what format the customer needs when we export stuff to CSV, and we don’t always get it right. (These are projects on a much smaller scale than Garmin Connect.)

    From the vendor’s POV, one solution might be to export in Excel format to remove certain kinds of ambiguity, but then that’s additional dev time / cost for them, and an additional burden on the end user (what if they don’t use excel?). (In the case of Garmin, if they aren’t even willing to normalize their lap time/pace formats for CSV, it’s doubtful they’d be willing to add an Export as Excel feature…)

  • 0 in reply to flowstate

    Regarding Excel format guessing, that's why I use LibreOffice calc where you can set the input format even for individual fields. Or increasingly I'm just using Python scripts so that I'm totally in control. 

    (Actually I'm lying, I use LibreOffice because I'm a Linux user... Wink)

  • 0 in reply to flowstate

    Thanks, to start with, it's nice to know I was not doing anything wrong. It is also good to know from other people that Garmin's output is inconsistent. Now I guess it is something I can live with and counter when it happens again.

    Peter