Types of handwritten data entry

Computer programmers, data entry, accounting firms, where a keyed data entry computer transcribes and name and address. computer furniture manufacturers and other types of businesses employed clerks. doctor offices, data entry and data-base information for use in patients with.

What skills are beneficial for data entry?

Data entry typing skills in a career should consider his extraordinary people. encoding error could be in computer program. the right writing skills 10 a careers supplement for people familiar with critical tasks should be the ability to understand the handwritten documents. the career area.

Data skier is a health hazard?

People who long for a computer data you enter down. it is important that good posture and proper way to employment data your computer to use ergonomic skiers. it is not carpal tunnel syndrome, neck, back, eyes, or under stress, may. stretching exercise that to be on the table are recommended.

What are the benefits of data entry work?

High speed Internet and the majority of homes with personal computers. If you work for a company, explore telecommuting employees. to free people can find jobs on the Internet, but be warned make sure that employment should be used is not a scam.

Data entry job for pay rate?

Keyes $ 15.00 USD per hour for experienced data entry-jobs usually pay between $ 10. medical sector salaries to employees who may be very high to type medical records. as part of my work computer programmers usually earn more.

If you limit your life to your home, or you have a job you and I from time to time, a data entry to not like the idea of making your work skills? All the top telecommuting jobs are available, data entry work from home in the middle of one of the most demanding work areas and it is usually a diploma or enough prior experience is not required.

Before the Internet data entry jobs

It was recently at you before you migrate to a great extent, the emergence of the Internet, Internet business to work for information processing employment. Most data entry jobs, handwritten document processing is a computer or a typewriter to type just a filing system to be introduced to.

In other cases, a data entry clerk is a large amount of documents, information or, for example, a client questionnaire box the way the collection can be attributed to this generally to familiarize yourself with the unique notation systems training company clerk, but these jobs are usually pretty simple. workers in the long run a large amount of data to process in a short amount of time Ends.

Online data entry jobs

Now that the Internet has come up with and how business is done and how the data are processed in a revolution not only became more electronic data entry, but also in the world, it is one of the fastest growing companies.

Some things in the old forms more information sources. for example, some of these tasks as jobs PDF files you will need to type in handwritten documents scanned home. in some cases, an employer document or send a box of handwritten documents for the company’s internal system.

The other thing is that the era of speed and efficiency of the Internet is when you start out in the field, it is acceptable to be a little slow, but it’s such a competitor, as soon as possible if you are only working to double and work while the attention get boring, So you should be able to to trouble.

Some bad news about jobs that in the era of the Internet technology becomes obsolete. for example, it is now computer handwriting recognition and handwritten documents is in automatic text to translate.

Source:http://www.clean2lean.com/164-types-of-handwritten-data-entry-2

Data scraping tool for non-coding journalists launches

A tool which helps non-coding journalists scrape data from websites has launched in public beta today.

Import.io lets you extract data from any website into a spreadsheet simply by mousing over a few rows of information.

Until now import.io, which we reported on back in April, has been available in private developer preview and has been Windows only. It is now also available for Mac and is open to all.

Although import.io plans to charge for some services at a later date, there will always be a free option.

The London-based start-up is trying to solve the problem of the fact that there is "lots of data on the web, but it's difficult to get at", Andrew Fogg, founder of import.io, said in a webinar last week.

Those with the know-how can write a scraper or use an API to get at data, Fogg said. "But imagine if you could turn any website into a spreadsheet or API."

Uses for journalists

Journalists can find stories in data. For example, if I wanted to do a story on the type of journalism jobs being advertised and the salaries offered, I could research this by looking at various websites which advertise journalism jobs.

If I were to gather the data from four different jobs boards and enter the information manually into a spreadsheet it would take would take hours if not days; if I were to write a screen scraper for each of the sites it would require knowledge and would probably take a couple of hours. Using import.io I can create a single dataset from multiple sources in a few minutes.

I can then search and sort the dataset and find out different facts, such as how many unpaid internships are advertised, or how many editors are currently being sought.

How it works

When you download the import.io application you see a web browser. This browser allows you to enter a URL for any site you want to scrape data from.

To take the example of the jobs board, this is structured data, with the job role, description and salaries displayed.

The first step is to set up 'connectors' and to do this you need to teach the system where the data is on the page. This is done by hitting a 'record' button on the right of the browser window and mousing over a few examples, in this case advertised jobs. You then click 'train rows'.

Building an extractor using import.io

Building an extractor in import.io

It takes between two and five examples to teach import.io where all of the rows are, Fogg explained in the webinar.

The next step is to declare the type of data and add column names. For example there may be columns for 'job title', 'job description' and 'salary'. Data is then extracted into the table below the browser window.

Data from different websites can then be "mixed" into a single searchable database.

Dataset page import.io

The dataset page

In the example used in the webinar, Fogg demonstrated how import.io could take data relating to rucksacks for sale on a shopping website. The tool can learn the "extraction pattern", Fogg explained, and apply that to to another product. So rather than mousing over the different rows of sleeping bags advertised, for example, import.io was automatically able to detect where the price and product details were on the page as it had learnt the structure from how the rucksacks were organised. The really smart bit is that the data from all products can then be automatically scraped and pulled into the spreadsheet. You can then search 'shoes' and find the data has already been pulled into your database.

When a site changes its code a screen scraper would become ineffective. Import.io has a "resilience to change", Fogg said. It runs tests twice a day and users get notified of any changes and can retrain a connector.

It is worth noting that a site that has been scraped will be able to detect that import.io has extracted the data as it will appear in the source site's web logs.

Case studies

A few organisations have already used import.io for data extraction. Fogg outlined three.

    British Red Cross

The British Red Cross wanted to create an iPhone app with data from the NHS Choices website. The NHS wanted the charity to use the data but the health site does not have an API.

By using import.io, data was scraped from the NHS site. The app is now in the iTunes store and users can use it to enter a postcode to find hospital information based on the data from the NHS site.

"It allowed them to build an API for a website where there wasn't one," Fogg said.

    Hewlett Packard

Fogg explained that Hewlett Packard wanted to monitor the prices of its laptops on retailers' websites.

They used import.io to scrape the data from the various sites and were able monitor the prices at which the laptops were being sold in real-time.

    Recruitment site

A US recruitment firm wanted to set up a system so that when any job vacancy appeared on a competitor's website, they could extract the details and push that into their Salesforce software. The initial solution was to write scrapers, Fogg said, but this was costly and in the end they gave up. Instead they used import.io to scrape the sites and collate the data.

Source:http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/data-scraping-tool-for-non-coding-journalists-launches/s2/a554002/

PDF Scraping: Making Modern File Formats More Accessible

Data scraping is the process of automatically sorting through information contained on the internet inside html, pdf or other documents and collecting relevent information to into databases and spreadsheets for later retrieval. On most websites, the text is easily and accessibly written in the source code but an increasing number of buisnesses are using Adobe PDF format (Portable Document Format: A format which can be viewed by the free Adobe Acrobat software on almost any operating system). The advantage of PDF format is that the document looks exactly the same no matter which computer you view it from making it ideal for buisness forms, specification sheets, etc.; the disadvantage is that the text is converted into an image from which you often cannot easily copy and paste. PDF Scraping is the process of data scraping information contained in pdf files. To PDF scrape a PDF document, you must employ a more diverse set of tools.

There are two main types of PDF files: those built from a text file and those built from an image(likely scanned in). Adobe’s own software is capable of PDF scraping from text-based PDF files but special tools are needed for PDF scraping text from image-based PDF files. The primary tool for PDF scraping is the OCR program. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, programs scan a document for small pictures that they can separate into letters. These pictures are then compared to actual letters and if matches are found, the letters are copied into a file. OCR programs can perform PDF scraping of image-based PDF files quite accurately but they are not perfect.

Once the OCR program or Adobe program has finished PDF scraping a document, you can search through the data to find the parts you are most interested in. This information can then be stored into your favorite database or spreadsheet program. Some PDF scraping programs can sort the data into databases and/or spreadsheets automatically making your job that much easier.

Quite often you will not find a PDF scraping program that will obtain exactly the data you want without customization. Surprisingly a search on google only turned up one business, (the amusingly named ScrapeGoat.com) that will create a customized PDF scraping utility for your project. A handful of off the shelf utilities claim to be customizable, but seem to require a bit of programming knowledge and time commitment to use effectively. Obtaining the data yourself with one of these tools may be possible but will likely prove quite tedious and time consuming. It may be advisable to contract a company that specializes in PDF scraping to do it for you quickly and professionally.

Let’s explore some real world examples of the uses of PDF scraping technology. A group at Cornell University wanted to improve a database of technical documents in PDF format by taking the old PDF file where the links and references were just images of text and changing the links and references into working clickable links thus making the database easy to navigate and cross-reference. They employed a PDF scraping utility to deconstruct the PDF files and figure out where the links were. They then could create a simple script to re-create the PDF files with working links replacing the old text image.

A computer hardware vendor wanted to display specifications data for his hardware on his website. He hired a company to perform PDF scraping of the hardware documentation on the manufacturers’ website and save the PDF scraped data into a database he could use to update his webpage automatically.

PDF Scraping is just collecting information that is available on the public internet. PDF Scraping does not violate copyright laws.

PDF Scraping is a great new technology that can significantly reduce your workload if it involves retrieving information from PDF files. Applications exist that can help you with smaller, easier PDF Scraping projects but companies exist that will create custom applications for larger or more intricate PDF Scraping jobs.

Source:http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/26868.html

7 Strategies for Writing Product Descriptions that Sell

Creating compelling product descriptions that encourage consumers to purchase is one of the most important content creation tasks. Perfecting your skill in this area can open up new opportunities for you as a writer and can allow you to leave your mark in the retail world.

These short bites of text provide solid information for consumers and promote the product lines of online retail stores, making them a good source of income for talented writers. Here are seven tips to polish your skills in the product description field.

    Highlight One Important Feature
    Address Consumer Concerns
    Personalize Your Approach
    Keep It Short and to the Point
    Stick to the Facts
    Write for Your Target Audience
    Maintain a Consistent Tone

1. Highlight One Important Feature

Rather than simply reciting a list of the general attributes of a commonly sold item, focus on one unique feature, attribute or use of the item. For example, an everyday No. 2 pencil in a cheerful shade of yellow could be described in this way:

Fill in those standardized test papers with a little help from our sunny No. 2 pencil. This writing instrument is ideal for everyday use and features a handy built-in eraser to correct any mistakes quickly and easily.

This approach is less useful for complex items with numerous distinguishing characteristics. However, it can provide a solid basis for short blurbs on common household or office items.

2. Address Consumer Concerns

One proven way to create compelling product descriptions is to put yourself in the buyer's shoes. What would you want to know about the item?

This is especially important for large-ticket items that constitute a major investment for most consumers. For automobile purchases, fuel economy and performance may be the primary concerns.

A description of a towel rack should include information about the material used and the surface finish to help consumers determine whether the item will match their existing decor and will stand up to regular use.

By considering the likely concerns of buyers and addressing them in your description, you can produce better results for your retail content customers.

3. Personalize Your Approach

A cold, clinical description can turn off your readers and result in fewer sales. By maintaining a somewhat more informal tone and adding humor when appropriate, you can boost the appeal of your product descriptions and create a more conducive mood for purchasing decisions.

Consumers will respond better to a warm, friendly tone in most cases and will reward your efforts with increased sales.

4. Keep It Short and to the Point

Consumers in the online world tend to have short attention spans. Your descriptions should hit the high points and provide adequate information on which to base a purchase decision. However, there's typically no need to include a history of the product in the consumer marketplace or a loving description of the process by which the item was made.

Stick to the point and deliver the information you would want and need as a consumer to provide the greatest benefit for your clients in the retail marketplace.

5. Stick to the Facts

Product descriptions are not the place for flights of fancy or false information. By providing factual descriptions with no misleading embellishments, you can ensure that consumers get the necessary data to make a purchase while ensuring that your representation of the product is accurate and fact-based.

This can protect your corporate clients from legal entanglements and ensure continued demand for your content creation services in the product description field.

6. Write for Your Target Audience

Doing a little market research on the demographic groups most likely to buy your chosen item can help you to hone your writing skills and produce exceptional copy for product descriptions. By pinpointing your target audience, you can increase their engagement with the product and win more sales for your clients.

A minivan, for instance, is generally purchased by families looking for extra room for passengers and plenty of cargo space; writing your product description with those concerns in mind can significantly improve the results of your work.

7. Maintain a Consistent Tone

While you may have developed a unique voice in your writing endeavors, product descriptions require that you adopt the client's tone as your own for best results. By reading over the site and paying careful attention to other product descriptions or online copy, you can create product descriptions that fit into your client's online catalog seamlessly and naturally.

This can increase the value of your writing to your client and can provide a more organic experience for consumers who visit the site.

Closing Thoughts

By incorporating these strategies into your writing process, you can create compelling and persuasive product descriptions for your clients and help them to increase their sales in the online marketplace. This can ensure repeat business from your established clients and help you to build a reputation for excellence in the content creation field.

Additional Resources

For more information, check out the resources below for the aspiring product description writer.

Source:https://www.crowdcontent.com/writer-resources/product-descriptions

Adult/Escort article writing and submission

I have a site exclusively in connection with the escort business in Europe. Currently receives about 20,000 visitors every month from google. I will be able to send you more accurate statistics of the traffic from your location, on request. I will write an article (500 words) related to your sevice and publish on my site with link to your escort site. Price: 50$

Below is my article package.

Escort article marketing – I will select the best keywords for your website (eg. London escort) and use them for your campaign. I will write 120 articles related to your service. I will publish them on various article directories and 50 blogs with 1 or 4 links (depending on directory rules) to your website. This will give you approximately 250 links to your website. Approval rating 100%. This technique will move you higher up the google ranking (position) for the chosen keywords. This process takes longer but the benefits last for a very long time. Price: 300$

How soon will you experience an increase in traffic to your escort site?

This depends on the 2 points. First of all depends on how popular the keywords that your targeting are. The less competitive keywords ( Liverpool escort ) will produce quicker results, more popular ones ( London escort ) will take longer. And the second depends on the age of your web domain. Domains 9 months to 1 year old or more will see results quicker then younger domains. This is because search indexes respect older domains more. You will usually start to see results after two or three weeks, and after 2 months or so you will feel the full benefits of this service.

Source:https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/adult-escort-article-writing-and-submission.1715530/

Scraping software, services and plugins sum up

Since we have already reviewed classic web harvesting software, we want to sum up some other scraping services and crawlers, scrape plugins and other scrape related tools.

Web scraping is a sphere that can be applied to a vast variety of fields, and in turn it can require other technologies to be involved. SEO needs scrape. Proxying is one of the methods which can help you to stay masked while doing much web data extraction. Crawling is another sub-technology indispensable in scrape for unordered information sources. Data refining follows the scrape, so as to deal with the unavoidable inconsistency of harvested data.

In addition, we will consider fast scrape tools, making our life better, and some services and handy scrapers which enable us to obtain freshly extracted data or images.

Web Scraping directory (classified by function)

Crawling
   
Proxy for scrape
   
Scrape services

Scrape plugins
   
Anti-scrape service
   
Tracking for change

Scrape for SEO
   
Fast scrape
   
Handy scrape
   
Scrape legal issues
   
Fast Scrape

Often I need to get something fast from the screen into my pocket. How to do it without invoking web scraping applications? What can help me?

Scraper, the Google Chrome extension is what makes my life easy. I’ve installed this extension in my favorite browser

( :-) ) and have this tool always embedded in the right-button menu. I highlight the sample area and right-click, and the same page area content is on the display, and with the next click, the content is on a Google spreadsheet. It is as easy as possible: no applications to run, no data samples, no target folders and other such things.

Another data extraction tool available, called TheWebMiner,  is one in the cloud. This cloud scraper lets you just manually enter data samples from the target site, and it will automatically define similar data and harvest them. The result is downloadable in CSV, XML and JSON formats.

Scrape services and tools

Among the scrape services we take note of:

Grepsr scraping service. This service allows administrators to set up a scrape project but still be able to control the scrape scheduling and other data extraction steps.

Inspyder, the application for scrape and crawl. It’s good for crawling first as many pages as possible, and then scraping by applying a predefined pattern.

The A1 Website scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using only Regexes. The output is saved into a CSV file. This scraper allows multifaceted tuning for web scraping. However, in mass data gathering, it consumes a lot of time.

Anti-scrape service

Since web scraping methods are being commonly used, many are concerned with malicious scrapers stealing website data, mirroring proprietary databases or throttling a site’s bandwidth. Why not have some protection against these invasions? We’ve reviewed an anti-scrape service, called Distil, that proved to be very robust and trustworthy. What I liked about it is that among other anti-scrape services, it’s quite user friendly.

Crawling tools

Then there are cases when users or companies do not need to get much data from the web, but rather they just need to crawl some web pages and index them based on certain criteria. What tools can help here? How about the 80legs service that does web crawling utilizing the power of thousands of widely distributed consumers’ computers while they are in idle mode? The claimed crawling speed is one to be ranked with modern search engines.

Scrape plugins

Need to acquire some fluctuating data to insert into your Word Press driven web page? The Web Scraper Shortcode plugin is good for that. Just insert it into the html code with the specified URL and desired element notation, and your page gets enriched with the elements of the extracted pages with set limits.

Another geeky tool is the WP Web Scraper, the Word Press plugin that works to extract web data into custom Word Press pages. The scraper uses a cURL extraction library for scraping and phpQuery for parsing HTML. This tool is a highly flexible plugin having plenty of the optional arguments: Regex replacement, basehref adding to the links, cache data timeout, target page decode and others.

Scrape for SEO

How can scrape help your website’s SEO? To fix the broken links to your website requires identifying them. In the video of SEOMoz you can watch how to do it and also find out more about XPath and Regex techniques. The link to the simple Twitter scraper is available there as a bonus.

Sometimes you need to gather together all your blog’s posts as they are indexed by Google. How to do a custom Google search results scraper (based on Outwit Hub) is really interesting to watch in this video.

Tracking a webpage for changes on it

Web scraping is often needed in conjunction with tracking particular info. Why harvest the whole content if no or only tiny changes occurred? In this case you do not need to scrape the page but rather only be aware of some changes on the monitored sites. These kinds of tools, keeping track of target page changes, both free and paid are reviewed at this post: Web Page Change Tracking.

For how to apply one of the free change tracking tools to a particular target page, you can go to this post.

Proxy for scrape

How do I set up my own scraper with proxy without programming or sophisticated proxy services sign up and tune up? The ScraperWiki is a toolset and a platform that makes this possible. This free service allows you to load and run any scraper written on PHP, Python or Ruby. Yes, its original purpose is to let people write or adopt a scraper for non-profit data gathering, but, in my experience, I’ve run my custom scraper on ScraperWiki for the sake of proxying.

Handy scrape

Why spend extra time and effort to visit the same page just to monitor tiny elements? If you want to look over a picture of the week or news of the day, use the Handy Web Extractor comfortably residing in your PC tray. This tiny handy tool will make life easier for you, emancipating you from the daily opening of the same pages.

Scrape legal issues

The legal issues concerning scrape or employee monitoring have always been an important consideration and worthy of careful attention for most lawful web users. So we call to your attention two posts: How to alarm if your website is under illegal scrape and Ethical issues of using employee monitoring software.

Summary

Web scraping, web mining, data extraction and website scrape encompass indeed a wide range of application technology. In spite of some malicious use of them, web data scraping serves well for business intelligence in the following areas (but not limited to these):

    web crawling services
    data scrape services
    seo improvement
    changes tracking
    fast scrape

The adjacent area of the web scraping is the website changes tracking and monitoring.

Source:http://scraping.pro/scraping-software-services-and-plugins-sum-up/

Better use of website data scraping Scraping

Try scraping website with Morena

Varies nature of the information received or scraped, but also places, stocks, and publicly available financial data you can store. Procedures scraping for you to use forums, blogs and other discussion sites may collect information about customers. Scraping tool changes in trends, traffic patterns, search engine and online advertising trends are identified. Some of us have used these tools to gather information and perform lead generation activities.

As with any technology solution, you want to perform. Elegance, efficiency, explores, and eases of use of three "E" to put your mind at ease. Affordability is also an essential part of your website scraper pricing decisions. This is why Morena cost-conscious companies looking to gain the competitive edge have become the tool of choice.

Web Crawling

Web crawling is a computer program that surf the internet. These programs around the set on the set of information on their websites are crawling with intent. This web ants crawling programs, bots, worms, and spiders are known as. Web search engines use the newly added website content for new and existing websites crawling stay informed. The search engines and users to provide the most up-to-date information is aware of. Web crawling websites by checking the left and HTML coding to be used as a maintenance program. This process is called the seed of the URL that starts with a list.

Mash up Software

Program information in a usable form for later use puts. Or you can take online to share information and news and stock predictions are able to combine these with information. Endless applications and business many companies use these tools to give them an edge in business.

RSS Feed

Create an RSS feed can be useful for many different reasons. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS various websites that you have the information you normally see, but any other website without the hassle of having to feeds. This creates a list of all updates from your favorite websites. Construction of these feeds can be easy with the right tools. With knowledge of HTML, you can use an RSS feed, you can create a website, even if your site does not have RSS feeds. Html scraping can help you to create RSS feeds.

Scrape

Web scraping once reserved for only the savviest computer geeks company, but advances in technology and the web have created changes in the free market, an essential part of large and small companies scraping. Web scraping software that can pull information and periodic may focus on specific websites. All relevant and accurate information.

Data mining

Data mining is the process of extracting information from the patterns of information. Examples of commonly used formulations simple word placement, address formats, or credit card number is seen in the wire.

Source:http://www.bharatbhasha.net/finance-and-business.php/401669

Data Mining With a Web Screen Scraping Software

Data collection from websites is a time consuming job hence you need a dedicated team to collect online data. Or you need a web screen scraping program that could download the required data in a suitable format. Choose software instead of relying on data mining team. The software could make your job a lot easier.

Advantages of using software

ItâEUR(TM) s time saving. You could complete a project in as little as one hour, if itâEUR(TM)s a short project like collecting contact details of targeted audiences from certain websites. Another advantage of this software is that it would free your data mining team from the tedious job. In this way, you would be able to utilize that team in other productive projects. In other words, using the software would improve your teamâEUR(TM)s productivity.

The software would arrange the data in the format that is suitable for you. For instance you could get Vcard details in spreadsheet and save the file for future use. Similarly you could get the data in the format suitable for market research, price comparison and business intelligence. The software would take care that you get the information in the format that is readable, understandable and convenient for you.

It would give you latest and authentic data. You could make mistakes in downloading the data like missing important information but there is no such apprehension with software. It would provide you information just like itâEUR(TM)s available on the web.

The software would be programmed to suit to your needs. It would be dedicated for your projects only. Since it would be coded for you, you could improve its functionality and usability as and required. For instance you could use the program to help your visitors fill forms. There could be more uses of the program.

For web screen scraping program, you could contact a reliable service provider. Since there are many groups that provide content scraping service, you could shop around to locate the most reliable service provider. You would be charged a price for the service but you could find most affordable service so that you donâEUR(TM)t feels pressure on your pocket.

If you need web content and you mine data manually then you should consider using web screen scraping service. You could get the data you need by paying a small amount. The software would provide you latest data that you could rely upon.

Source: http://goarticles.com/article/Data-Mining-With-a-Web-Screen-Scraping-Software/7761459/

Experian Launches Email Validation Service

Experian Data Quality releases new cloud-based email validation available to Improve Sender Reputation and Deliverability across email marketing programs.

Experian Data Quality, a part of Experian Marketing Services and a leading provider of contact data management software and services, today announced the release of new email validation software that allows businesses to maximize return on investment and communication efforts through the email channel. The new tool offers faster validation speed, simplified response codes and improved match rates.

“Email represents a critical link between brands and consumers. In fact, in a recent Experian Data Quality research study, businesses identified email as the most important communication channel, followed by social media and phone,” said Thomas Schutz, general manager, Experian Data Quality. “Our new product enhancements align with Experian Data Quality’s commitment to helping our clients efficiently and accurately capture contact data to enable downstream processes, analytics and cross-channel marketing.”

With 36 percent of U.S. companies operating across five or more communication channels, according to the same recent Experian Data Quality study, email is an extremely valuable part of any omnichannel strategy. QAS Email allows users to validate business and consumer email addresses at the point of entry, allowing Experian Data Quality clients to collect a greater number of valid emails and ultimately better connect with their customers and prospects.

Source:http://emailexpert.org/experian-launches-email-validation-service/

Data validation in Excel

Office 365 offers a number of popular programs including Microsoft Excel which has long been an important program in any business. With features that allow users to track data, finances or even create tables, businesses rely on it. A popular function that is found in Excel is data validation, which could be useful in many different situations.

Here is an overview of Excel’s data validation.

What is data validation?

This useful Excel feature allows users to set a limit as to the type of data that can be entered into a cell or cells. If you use this feature you can prevent users from entering invalid data types, warn them when invalid data is entered or give them a message as to the type of data you want entered.

You can find this function by clicking on the Data tab in Excel and looking under the Data Tools group. When you click on it, a window will open allowing you to configure and set a data validation.

How can it be used?

There are numerous uses for data validation, the most popular being when you will be sharing a spreadsheet with other users who will input data into an already designed spreadsheet. Other uses include:

    Limiting number input - For example, if you have a form that requires users to input a 10 digit phone number, you can set a validation so that only 10 numbers can be used.

    Limit choices to a list - If you have a spreadsheet where users need to pick data from a list of choices, you can set the choices in the validation and users will only be able to select from the list.

    Setting maximum dollar amounts - If you have a spreadsheet with salary bonuses for your department, and the maximum bonus is 20% of the yearly salary, you can set a validation that allows for a maximum of 20%. If a user enters 21%, they will get an error message.

How do I create a data validation?

You can create a validation by:

    Setting up your spreadsheet as you want the user to see it. You don’t have to put any numbers in, just the layout.

    Selecting the cells you want to apply the validation to by clicking on the upper most cell and dragging to the lower most.

    Clicking on the Data tab above the spreadsheet

    Selecting Data Validation from the Data Tools group.

A window will open with three options: Settings, Input Message and Error Alert.

Under Settings pressing the arrow under Allow: will let you pick what type of data you want to be entered in that cell. For example, if you are going to limit the cells to only whole numbers select Whole Number from the drop-down list. The other options will change depending on the type of validation you pick.

Input Message will allow you to set a message that will pop-up when a user hovers their mouse over the cells. To attach a message, simply enter a title for the message in the Title box and the actual message in the Input message: box. Press Ok and the message should show up when you hover your mouse over the cells.

The Error Alert tab allows you to set and customize an alert that will show when a user enters an invalid form of data. You can select from a number of different styles and icons and even configure the error message that will be displayed.

Source:http://nssit.com/data-validation-in-excel/

A Guide to Web Scraping Tools

This post is ghost written by one of my bloggers, I outsource 95% of my life.  The author’s views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of  Gareth James aka SEO Doctor

Web Scrapers are tools designed to extract / gather data in a website via crawling engine usually made in Java, Python, Ruby and other programming languages.Web Scrapers are also called as Web Data Extractor, Data Harvester , Crawler and so on which most of them are web-based or can be installed in local desktops.

Its main purpose is to enable webmasters, bloggers, journalist and virtual assistants to harvest data from a certain website whether text, numbers, contact details and images in a structured way which cannot be done easily thru manual copy and paste method. Typically, it transforms the unstructured data on the web, from HTML format into a structured data stored in a local database or spreadsheet or automates web human browsing.

Source: http://www.garethjames.net/a-guide-to-web-scrapping-tools/

Expedia Data Scraping

With the online community there are plenty of companies that offer services. But some of these companies are not who they say they are, and do not produce the results they boast about. This is devastating to clients, and customers who purchase products and services only to feel let down in the end. One thing happening online right now are companies who claiming to offer high quality data scraping services.

Currently the kind of companies that participate in this kind of behavior are hurting the market. They are claiming to offer high quality web scraping for a low price, and these statements are just not entirely true. In fact they are offering low quality data scraping services for a very high price. They are taking advantage of people who are not knowledgeable about the business. Theses types of business practices are not favorable and are very unethical.

That is why our company could not have came at a better time. People want to do business with a company that has integrity overall. When you can mix high quality for low price in that equation as well, people will begin to notice. With all the bad companies around, people want something that is competent, cost effective, and high quality. That is a win situation for all the parties involved.

We are aware of how useful date scraping services are, and what it take to stand out in this industry. We have employees with experience in the field, and we can take care of any kind of web scraping service desired. If someone is trying to people looking for children’s toys online, we will put you in a position to market your products to them.

Our quality and level of service is second to nobody in the field. We work hard to separate ourselves from pack, and our work shows. If you interested in web scraping services, we are the perfect place for you. We are courteous and professional at all times. We want you to win, because it is our job, and we also have reputation to uphold. So don’t hesitate, we are waiting for you.

Source:http://thewebscraping.com/expedia-data-scraping/

Easy and Practical Web scraping in Python

This post is inspired by an excellent post called Web Scraping 101 with Python. It is a great intro to web scraping to Python, but I noticed two problems with it:

    It was slightly cumbersome to select elements
    It could be done easier

If you ask me, I would write such scraping scripts using an interactive interpreter like IPython and by using the simpler CSS selector syntax.

Let’s see how to create such throwaway scripts. For serious web scraping, Scrapy is a more complete solution when you need to perform repeated scraping or something more complex.

The Problem

We are going to solve the same problem mentioned in the first link. We are interested in knowing the winners of Chicago Reader’s Best of 2011. Unfortunately the Chicago Reader page shows only the five sections. Each of these sections contain award categories e.g. ‘Best vintage store’ in ‘Goods & Services’. Within each of these award category pages you will find the winner and runner up. Our mission is to collect the names of winners and runner ups for every award and present them as one simple list.

The Setup

Start python, IPython, bpython or any other interactive python interpreter of your choice. I shall be using IPython for the rest of this article.

A common starting point for most web parsing needs is getting a parsed web page from a URL. So let’s define our get_page function as follows:

from urllib2 import urlopen

from lxml.html import fromstring

def get_page(url):
    html = urlopen(url).read()
    dom = fromstring(html)
    dom.make_links_absolute(url)
    return dom

Within the get_page function, the first line downloads the page using urlopen function and returns it’s contents in the form of a string. The second line uses lxml to parse the string and returns the object representation of the page.

Since, most links in the html page will be relative pages we will convert them to absolute links. For e.g. a link like /about will be converted into http://www.chicagoreader.com/about. This makes it easy to call get_page function on such URLs later.

Selecting Page Elements

Next we need to invoke this function and select parts of the document. But before that we need to know which parts we need.

I prefer using CSS selector syntax compared to XPaths for selecting nodes. For examplem, the path to the same element in these two different syntax are shown below:

    CSS Path: html body#BestOf.BestOfGuide div#gridClamp div#gridMain div#gridFrame div#gridMainColumn div#StoryLayout.MainColumn div#storyBody.page1 strong p a

    XPath: /html/body/div[3]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[5]/div/strong/p[2]/a

CSS paths might be longer but are easier to understand. More importantly, they are easier to construct.

On Firefox, you can use Firebug to right click on any page element to get it’s CSS path.

Finding CSS paths in Firefox using Firebug

On Chrome, you will not be able to copy the CSS path but you can see it displayed on the status bar at the bottom

Finding CSS paths in Chrome

Selector Gadget

These CSS paths are extremely long and I wouldn’t recommend using them. They are too specific and tied to the overall document structure, which might change. Moreover, you can shorten a CSS selector path without affecting it’s specificity.

I recommend using a bookmarklet called Selector Gadget which elegantly solves both these problems. It also works across browsers.

First drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar. Open any page and click on the Selector Gadget to activate it. Now click on the element for which you want the CSS selector. Once you click an element, it will turn yellow and the CSS selector will appear in the gadget. Many other elements matching that selector will be also shown in yellow.

Sometimes, elements which you do not require are also matched. To eliminate that, click on an element you DO NOT want to match. Continue this process of selection and rejection till you get the exact CSS selector you want. Click on the ‘Help’ button for instructions.

Using iPython

Start your iPython interpreter and paste the lines of code, we saw previously:

$ ipython
Python 2.7.3 (default, Sep 26 2012, 21:51:14)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 0.13.1.rc2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object', use 'object??' for extra details.

In [1]: from urllib2 import urlopen

In [2]: from lxml.html import fromstring

In [3]: def get_page(url):
   ...:         html = urlopen(url).read()
   ...:         dom = fromstring(html)
   ...:         dom.make_links_absolute(url)
   ...:         return dom
   ...:

In [4]: dom = get_page("http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011/BestOf?oid=4100483")

In the last line, you retrieve the initial page you would like to be scraped and assign its parsed DOM object into dom.

In the next three commands, cssselect function is invoked with the CSS selector “#storyBody p a” to get all the section links. The result is a list. Since we need just the URLs, we run a list comprehension across the list of links.

In [5]: dom.cssselect("#storyBody p a")
Out[5]:
[<Element a at 0x336ae90>,
 <Element a at 0x336afb0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c2f0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c3b0>,
 <Element a at 0x336c170>,
 <Element a at 0x336c350>]

In [6]: [link.attrib['href'] for link in _]
Out[6]:
['http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-city-life/BestOf?oid=4106233',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-goods-and-services/BestOf?oid=4106022',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-sports-recreation/BestOf?oid=4106226',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-food-drink/BestOf?oid=4106228',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-arts-culture/BestOf?oid=4106230',
 'http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/best-of-chicago-2011-music-nightlife/BestOf?oid=4106223']

In [7]: secns = _

Note that we are using the underscore ‘_’ symbol to refer to the result of the previous command. With this tip, we can avoid inventing names for temporary results. Also whenever we get a result worth keeping, we can name them in hindsight.

Finding all categories

Next we need to retrieve and parse each section page. It can be easily done with the following list comprehension. The second command is a nested list comprehension with two loops. As before, we just need the urls. All 389 of them, each representing an award category.

In [13]: doms = [get_page(secn) for secn in secns]

In [14]: [link.attrib['href'] for dom in doms for link in dom.cssselect("#storyBody a")]
Out[14]:

In [15]: categs=_

In [16]: len(categs)
Out[16]: 389

Finding the title, winner and runner-up

Next, open any url from the categs list and find CSS selectors for our items of interest. These three items are: award category title, winner and runner-up. Since cssselect function returns a list (even if only one match is found) we need to extract the 0-th element. Another function called text_content is applied to get just the information we are looking for.

In [17]: categ = categs[0]

In [18]: dom=get_page(categ)

In [19]: dom.cssselect("h1.headline")[0].text_content()
Out[19]: u'Best longtime cause worth fighting for\xa0'

In [20]: dom.cssselect(".boc1")[0].text_content()
Out[20]: 'Public school reform'

In [21]: dom.cssselect(".boc2")[0].text_content()
Out[21]: 'Recycling in Chicago'

Named Tuples - Ideal data structures for scraped input

Earlier, tuples were used for storing scrapped results. They use less memory compared to dictionaries. Recently, Python has support for named tuples which are much clearer to use and just as memory efficient.

The next few commands loops through all the award categories and adds a named tuple for each. To avoid fetching too many pages, I have truncated the list to only the first two items.

In [22]: from collections import namedtuple

In [23]: Award = namedtuple("Award", "title, winner, runnerup")

In [24]: awards = []

In [25]: for categ in categs[:2]:
             dom=get_page(categ)
             title = dom.cssselect("h1.headline")[0].text_content()
             winner = dom.cssselect(".boc1")[0].text_content()
             runnerup = dom.cssselect(".boc2")[0].text_content()
             a = Award(title=title, winner=winner, runnerup=runnerup)
             awards.append(a)

In [36]: awards
Out[36]:
[Award(title=u'Best longtime cause worth fighting for\xa0', winner='Public school reform', runnerup='Recycling in Chicago'),
 Award(title=u'Best historic building\xa0', winner='Chicago Cultural Center', runnerup='The Rookery')]

Power of Interactivity

For one-time scraping scripts, it is often best to use just the Python interpreter. I have tried to walk you through how I would attack the problem of scraping a set of web pages. Hope you found it useful!

Source:http://arunrocks.com/easy-practical-web-scraping-in-python/

Data Scraping Services Become Famous In The World As Business

Scrapping also called screen scrapers aside a specific web site to web sites using the latest tools for extracting information from the process. Website dismantling of automated scripts or programs that are written using Java, Perl, Python, is using such programming languages, etc. together a website, without any manual intervention automated tools to access web information to the control solution.

Web Scrapper for people to manually copy and paste information from thousands of websites is designed to find boring. Web Scraper can target users of information scrap and MySQL, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, etc., such as the different formats, to allow the export of

Web pages are structured to unstructured content into a Web Scrapper can help. Scrapper on the product information site, information, online shopping, news, press releases, contact information, stock quotes and other financial information may be useful to remove.

Web scraper companies, job portals, e – commerce web sites, directories, search engines and shopping sites, or information gathering of the material. Web scraper to help save many hours a person dedicated to data extraction itself and will dramatically reduce the time required.

Web Scraper using advanced Internet search algorithms to extract data from web pages, you can solve this problem.

Web Scrapper only software program that will crawl through the web and unstructured data from web pages and collect the required format and exported to the job of your choice. Web scraper Technical view by typing a URL to visit website after website and information on the Internet as a man. Web scraper data using advanced algorithms that are applied to PHP, Perl, Python, etc. This makes the programming languages by using the tracking

the measure of a website’s web pages to your local hard disk is useful for extracting information. Scrapper is a graphical user interface that you have a web URL (Uniform Resource Locator) allows you to create, delete data and is scrolling off the tracking algorithm is used to delete data.

Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.

 Web Scrapper at regular intervals using a scraper can be used with web data to your spreadsheet; you can download an online database. Web scraper to collect a large amount of information can be informal and useful information, formatting them into the analysis purposes.

Web Scrappers various sectors of business are used in various purposes such as track creation, marketing, market analysis, strategy setting, based on the analysis of foreign exchange, stock quotes, product prices, etc. The information is collected using a web scrapper; your business can obtain information on the Internet.

Web scraper public information websites, email addresses for marketing purposes that can be used to create a large mailing list can be tracked. Commercial customers for their products and offer you the world in the proposals to be sent to the email address you can use online promotion. Scrappers search engine spiders the web works similarly, but more powerful than you, and we obtain the desired output format, we can.

Source:http://www.platforms.net/data-scraping-services-become-famous-in-the-world-as-business/