Exporting Activities to CSV

chri77ly said:

That wouldn’t be such a big deal if additional activities didn’t keep loading in small chunks as I scroll.

Yeah I've pointed out many times that Garmin's implementation of "infinite scroll" / lazy loading is bad for the activities list in the Connect website. Garmin treats the activities list like a basic social media feed, where only a few activities are loaded as you scroll to the bottom (or top) of the currently displayed part of the list, and there's no way to jump to some arbitrary point in the list. The more activities you have, the slower and more tedious it is to scroll to where you want.

Garmin's behaviour makes sense for a social media feed, where people typically only care about what's at the top of list (i.e. the most recent / most highly recommended content). It doesn't make sense for a historical list of activities, where there's little point in giving people access to all the activities if it's not really possible or practical to scroll through all of them.

It's not impossible - or very hard - to implement infinite scroll combined with the ability to quickly jump anywhere in a big list [*], but Garmin would have to care in the first place.

[*] See: 

- Spotify app [your library tab]. Not only does it have a functional scroll bar [combined with lazy loading], the scroll bar gives you information about where you are in the list (month/year).

- NodeBB forums [you have the ability to instantly jump to any point in a huge thread, on both mobile and desktop]. Here the custom scroll bar tells you the post # in the current thread.

- Strava [training log] [both app and website]. This doesn't have a custom scroll bar, but you can scroll anywhere in the list instantly [even though it's lazy loaded], and there's also calendar sidebar which allows you to precisely jump to given month/year or race.

- Stryd app [calendar]. Here you can quickly scroll to any date you want, when you're trying to find an activity from a certain point in time.

I even posted a proof of concept in another thread using AG Grid [a popular grid package for websites/web apps]. It took me a few minutes to create the demo [since the relevant functionality already exists out of the box].

Garmin could use AG Grid and get similar results - if they cared.

In general I think Garmin is bad at anything which involves navigating through long lists of data. Even paging through the calendar in both the Connect app and website takes forever, because once you press the next/previous button, you have to wait for the next/previous day/week/month/year to load before you can press the next/previous button again. In an ideal world you would at least be able to press next/previous multiple times without being forced to wait for each page to load [since you're not interested in the intermediate pages when you're trying to quickly page between consecutive periods].

And to your point, it's kinda of dumb that you have to scroll through all the activities in the first place, just for them to be exported to CSV. All activities (or perhaps all activities matching the current filter) should be exported by default.

Speaking of dumb decisions, it's really dumb that you can't use the advanced filter unless you select an activity category first (like running). Since the infinite scroll is busted and the calendar is slow, the advanced filter is one of the only practical ways to show activities from the not-so-recent past, but you can't use it unless you select a category like running first.

It's almost like Garmin doesn't care about usability. Almost.

chri77ly said:

is there another way to do it?

You could use the free site https://runalyze.com/, which syncs with your Connect account. From there you can export summary data for all activities to CSV any time you want. Only problem is if you have a huge amount of Connect history, there might be some manual steps required for you to get all of it in runalyze.