MikeW's Online Spreadsheet - Needs Fixing

[JohnnyO]

Somebody made some sorting mistakes to Mike's spreadsheet here:

http://www.editgrid.com/user/mlwilliams/Z_Car_Registry

It only appears to be on the 240Z tab. Unfortunately, we all need to go back in and correct our own info. I really like referring to this sheet when I see vehicles for sale to see if we have the history. I am sure others use it for other research too.

I think we would all appreciate your efforts if you could verify/fix your cars info.

Thanks,

John

[sblake01]

I've fixed mine several times only to find it changed/altered at some later date. Nature of the beast...it's a public spreadsheet.

[JohnnyO]

It's a mess this time.

[mally002]

Wow, your right it's a mess.

They have me listed as having a 72 model, which I've never owned; and have #797 listed with another owner and showing wrong color, engine #, build date, etc.

Looks like a lot of the information got scrambled.........

[mgood]

Even the 280's are mixed up. It seems that someone is sorting on a single column for some reason. My vin was on both Stealth-Z and rockr69's cars. Now fixed.

[DeesZ]

I just fixed mine two weeks ago, and it's all messed up again. I have much more faith in the Z-Home list found at: http://www.zhome.com/.

Thank you, Carl for your efforts in creation and maintenance.

[MikeW]

I certainly apologize for the damage done (presumably unintentionally). I created the spreadsheet in the first place due to the difficultly of getting my car added to that other list. I'd heard the same from others. It seemed like letting everyone handle their own data would keep the work load off of a single individual.

I had hoped to go back and manually fix the data based on past revisions but unfortunately even the oldest revision is broken. I should have been downloading it regularly. I agree that it's even worse than before since someone has sorted all of the columns. The data is all there but not matched up.

At this point it seems like there are two options: 1) get everyone to fix their data and come up with a way to prevent damage or, 2) give up on it completely.

I'm open to suggestions. As I've said before ideally this data would be hosted on this site in a proper database. It would even better if it was part of your profile where you could add one or more cars with all of the appropriate data and then have a master view that's read-only for all cars.

[GreenZZZ]

Run it like an open source project where list of 10 or so folks who know what they are doing can actually modify the data. A simple data entry web page and simple approve/reject page could be written in something simple like PHP. Might make a fun Google Web Toolkit app which would mean java.

[MikeW]

I agree that it would be easy to put together a web page for this so that people could still enter their own data without waiting for someone else to get around to publishing it. The problem is where to host it. The online spreadsheet I used is free. Once again, ideally it would be hosted on this site but I've suggested that in the past. If it was hosted elsewhere there would be a cost associated with the domain name and server.

[Mike B]

Man, the spreadsheet is really a mess now. It may be too far gone to save if there isn't a decent backup copy somewhere. Too bad that getting added to the Zhome info appears to be hit or miss. I have also tried to get my cars added a few times to no avail, so I have just given up on it.

-Mike

[EScanlon]

The problem with the form lies in that it allows a single column to be sorted without linking the adjacent columns. It may "mirror" Excel, but Excel keeps the complete record row together when sorting by a single column.

E

[JohnnyO]

I found a free online database. Let me set something up and maybe we can work from that. MikeW, I would still like you to be in control of it if you are interested.

Let me know.

John