Flex MLS - Exporting Comps to MS Excel

[Laughing Heir]

Does anyone have experience with exporting comps out of this MLS database?

I don't have too much experience with macros (or Excel in general) and am becoming extremely tired of reformatting the spreadsheet every time I export comps.

I'd ideally like to export every listing in the history of our digital MLS (dates back to 1998) so that I can add them to a database I have for the county I live in. Then, it would be great to be able to update it monthly without completely screwing up the spreadsheet I started with.

This post is all over the place. It reflects my lack of knowing exactly what to do with the comps once I export them ... please help!

Macros - useful or not? Tips for organization? Tips on exporting format? Any advice is much appreciated!

Mike

 

[VegasWayne]

Why use Excel? You are trying to create and maintain a database, use a database program such as Access. Database programs allow you to set up queries to search the data, similar to the searches you do when using the MLS database.

 

[CANative]

Use the help (contact us) button to get their technical support guys on the phone. They're very, very helpful, courteous and patient. Flex is a pretty good system.

 

[VegasWayne]

Tip on export format: Use tab delimited - comma delimited has been known to cause confusion in software because of the commas in the prices. For example $1,000,000 might be imported into three fields of $1 000 and 000.

 

[Laughing Heir]

I'm trying to use the dreaded openoffice database software - Base. It's freeware but it is pretty robust. It does make sense to eliminate the redundancy of using Excel but I'm not that familiar with the database software yet.

Thanks for the tip on comma delimited, I haven't had that happen to me but I could imagine it wouldn't be that much fun.

Greg - I did use the techies from FLEX to fix the formatting problem I was having with the MLS numbers. Our format in this area is ##-#### or ##-##### if it's a really good/bad year. The .xls export would automatically try to format the MLS # as one string of numbers, or, even worse, a date.

Thanks for the feedback!