Appraisers' Free Forum

Here's a link to a quick-and-dirty how-to on how to import text files into Excel.

http://www.mrexcel.com/tip125.shtml

You'll have to do research on your own MLS systems to see how they export data. One of my sources is directed primarily at real estate agents who want to mail advertizing to potential clients, so most of the exported data consists of the owner's name, address, city, state, zip. Useless for our type of market analysis. But one entry, called "Generic export," dumps all the sale particulars--site value, sale price, sale date, GLA, DOM--all the neat stuff you can use to analyze a market.

This article shows you how to take that exported file and look at it in Note Pad to see what's in it. You may have to do that with each of the export options on your MLS before you find the export format that suits your needs and includes the information that you want. Some systems offer you the option to select the fields you want to include in your export. This is by far the best option, IMO.

Once you've got the data exported from MLS, it should be sitting in a text file on your hard drive somewhere. You can then follow the instructions on the link above to import it into Excel for analysis and charting.

While you're on the Mr. Excel site, look around at the other offerings available. This is a really good site for learning neat Excel tricks.

Wow, that's pretty neat Jim!

While I'm not a trainee...I can imagine quite a few uses for this tool.

Thanks

I agree with Mike - great link - there is, for those too lazy to look, a regular daily pod cast that you can just bookmark and get hints on, as well as look at old podcasts.

Just one thing I need to point out: If you're importing any file that has a column of data which LOOKS like a date, but isn't, be sure to use the import dialog box to set that column to text. This can include stuff like section references, or maybe APN's, which are formatted like 9-27 or 9/27. Excel doesn't need the whole date. Those examples would be shown (and imported) as 9-27-2008 or 9/27/08.

You'll see that import dialog in Excel or OpenOffice right after you click on the name of the file to import. Down at the bottom of the dialog, it will show what it will import and how it will be imported. Click on the column header and choose "Text" as the data type, and then hit the "OK" button. You might want to do the same thing for columns which are formatted as currency if you're having trouble with money amounts showing up as "$150,000" and aligned left like text. I think most spreadsheets are smarter than that, but if you find that money amounts can't be used in calculations, just reformat the column to "Currency."

Note: You can't reformat a column that is erroneously imported as a date. It will just show a serial date when you do. It will not revert to the original text. Import of things that look like dates has to be done as TEXT from the import dialog.