Newbie questions

[chickenhead]

Hi Guys,
I'm still pretty new to handicapping, always found it fascinating, don't have as much time as I'd like to spend on it. I started to get a little more serious last year, read some books, Brohamer, Davidowitz, Beyer, Quinn, Quirin.....I've always just used paper and pencil up till a few months ago, I tried writing a simple Excel program, it grew to about 30MB quickly, and was just basically pretty unwieldy. I don't know any prog. languages, but if I try again I'll learn something, VB or Java...I understand fully now why programmers are suposed to design first, code second, I jumped in a little to quickly, ended up rewriting everything multiple times.

So my question, are there any reasonably inexpensive software out their that I could get just to fool around on, help me with ideas, etc? I see you guys discuss all sorts of programs here, but I don't know what they cost....can someone give me some ideas on what might be a good place to start?

[sq764]

You'll hear a million different suggestions..

My suggestion is to play around with Excel and the Trackmaster data files.. You can manipulate the data any way you like and the biggest challenge is simply identifying the data fields..

[chickenhead]

One thing I've never heard anyone talk about that stumped me a bit, how do you guys (pace guys) deal with overseas horses first time NA? If you're just laying top picks from your program, do you sit out any races where they appear, or do you somehow account for them within the program?

[sjk]

I have had excellent success with Access. There are size limits but I have not outgrown it in over 10 years.

I can imagine that a 30Mb Excel file would bog down since it is hard to break things in pieces and to calculate things only as you need them. An Access program of over 1Gb still gives good performance if you break things into bite sized pieces.

[chickenhead]

I played around a bit with Access, but I admit I didn't learn to use much of it. What I was doing was loading BRIS files into Excel, manipulating them there, then moving into Access and sorting them in different ways. I did think Access was pretty neat for that, I think my main problem was with Excel, I guess I probably am not an expert user yet, but I kept running into some problems, like being limited to 7 IF THEN per function, my formulas were not as compact as they could have been I'm sure.

Am I correct in my original thinking that Access doesn't really have any math functions, and you have to do all that in Excel?

Also I was using Office 97 version, is it worth upgrading to 2000 or is it basically the same?

[sjk]

Access has all the math functions you need. Since you can break your calculations into pieces, there is no limit to the complexity of your calculations.

The 97 version works fine. I have upgraded over the years but mainly since I also use Access for work and did not want to run multiple versions.

[Tom]

What handicapping area are you interested in? Pace, class, .....
There are some good programs to use depending on what your interest is.

[chickenhead]

OK, I'll go back and spend some time with Access, I've got a book around here somewheres...

Thanks...I'll post some more questions I'm sure

[chickenhead]

Tom,
What really got me juiced was Brohamers book on Pace, so that is really what I wanted to look at first, that's how I got to this wonderful board :)

I do have lots more questions about making the right adjustments for distance etc, but that is why I wanted to play with a program, see how they do it, emulate in Excel and basically reverse engineer till I get the same numbers, and see if they makes sense to me.

If you can suggest one that would be great.
Thanks,
Raleigh

[sq764]

If anyone uses Trackmaster data files in Excel (for t-breds), I would love to pick your brain..

I sue them for harness, but haven't been able to figure out the t-bred ones

[Tom]

Originally posted by chickenhead
Tom,
What really got me juiced was Brohamers book on Pace, so that is really what I wanted to look at first, that's how I got to this wonderful board :)

I do have lots more questions about making the right adjustments for distance etc, but that is why I wanted to play with a program, see how they do it, emulate in Excel and basically reverse engineer till I get the same numbers, and see if they makes sense to me.

If you can suggest one that would be great.
Thanks,
Raleigh


Chickenhead, send me a PM or email.