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Importing a Trip Log into Excel

After you have run a few trips through Wandrous, you may want to import the trip logs so that you can proudly show your boss that your $1.99 USD investment for business record keeping has paid off. The simplest way to do that is to import your log into Excel. There may be another spreadsheet program out there, but I don't know what it is, so this example will stick to that venerable beast.

1. Export Logs

The first thing you will need to do is export your trip log from Wandrous. This is accomplished in four easy steps, as the following illustration demonstrates.

2. Find the Trip Log and Sync it to your Computer

Wandrous exports the logs to the wandrous/triplog folder on your Android device.

Every Android device has a complete file system, because in fact it is built on Linux. Depending on your device, it may or may not have a file explorer built in. If not, there are plenty available on the Android Market. The one we use is Astro.

Use your file explorer, and browse to the wandrous/triplog folder. In there your will find the log you just exported.

You need to copy that file to your desktop so that you can bring it into Excel. I'm sure you already know how to sync files Wink

3. Import into Excel

This example uses Excel 2007 steps. They may or may not be the same in other vintages of Excel, but similar functionality is certainly available.

The first step is to open the file so that it can be imported. Use the Open command, and be sure you have selected "*.*" as the file type so that the Wandrous trip log appears in your list.

Once the file is opened, Excel presents you with the first of a three-step dialog. On this first screen, be sure the Delimited option is checked, and specify that your import begins with row 1.

After clicking Next, choose Semicolon as the delimiter. This is important -- if you do not choose this, your import will not be correctly divided into columns.

Click Next again and your last step appears. For the best results, you should click on each column header and set the datatype. For all but the average speed, distance, and time columns, you will want to select either Text or, for the starttime and stoptime, Date in the YMD format. 

Click Finish, and you will have your import. The following example shows an actual import, after widening some columns and sorting the starttime, from newest to oldest.

Now isn't that fun? You can see every trip you ever took, why you took it, and how long you were on it. Kind of makes you want to drive around some more...Oh, and as you can see from row 7 in the example, you can track airline miles, too. 

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