Print to file - what is the format?

[M Skabialka]

It's legal - it's my own timecard in columns of days, accounts and hours on
the web!
I wanted to select a range of dates copy it into Excel and analyse it.
I can see the data on the screen but when I try to select and copy, nothing
goes into the clipboard.
I tried to save the webpage but only got the header and the menu on the
left - no data.
Edit, Select All highlights nothing. I can select items in the menu to the
left, or the header area of the page. The actual data does not respond to
efforts to select anything.
Right click on the data gives a choice of Print, Settings (Only hardware
acceleration is there), and "about Adobe Flash Player 10"
I tried print to file but it has garbage - probably printer instructions.

I tried using Microsoft XPS Document Writer as you suggested, and opened it
with XPSViewer and Internet Explorer. In both cases it was like a screen
shot, where I can see the data but not capture it because it is a picture.

I'm thinking this has something to do with security and Adobe Flash.
I have given up on my quest - this is too time consuming to pursue. Thanks
for your detailed suggestions.
Mich

 

[Richard]

[see below]

It's legal - it's my own timecard in columns of days, accounts and hours
on the web!
I wanted to select a range of dates copy it into Excel and analyse it.
I can see the data on the screen but when I try to select and copy,
nothing goes into the clipboard.
I tried to save the webpage but only got the header and the menu on the
left - no data.
Edit, Select All highlights nothing. I can select items in the menu to
the left, or the header area of the page. The actual data does not
respond to efforts to select anything.
Right click on the data gives a choice of Print, Settings (Only hardware
acceleration is there), and "about Adobe Flash Player 10"
I tried print to file but it has garbage - probably printer instructions.

I tried using Microsoft XPS Document Writer as you suggested, and opened
it with XPSViewer and Internet Explorer. In both cases it was like a
screen shot, where I can see the data but not capture it because it is a
picture.

I'm thinking this has something to do with security and Adobe Flash.
I have given up on my quest - this is too time consuming to pursue.
Thanks for your detailed suggestions.
Mich

Hi again, Mich,

You're welcome, and thanks for the clarification of what you were wanting to
do. (After you mentioned "Excel", I only just now noticed that the right
click menu on a page in Internet Explorer has an "Export to Microsoft Excel"
option. It is strange how often things are in plain sight and we fail to
notice them.

Apparently the information in your problem table is a graphics picture, and
not text formatted with ordinary html table code. If you can right-click on
the table, and "Save Picture As", or Screen Capture and paste to a graphics
program like Paint, it would then be possible to use OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) software to convert the picture to a text format, possibly
preserving the column format, which maybe Excel could import without too
much editing. That method tends to be very "time consuming" also, and often,
the time to edit out the OCR errors is greater than the time to simply open
a NotePad document beside the graphics and type the information by sight.
(Yeah, not my first choice either!

There is a slim possibility, if the web script that serves up the page uses
some sort of "browser detect" to determine HOW to format the data, that, if
you dis-able the Adobe Flash add-on, (in Internet Explorer, Tools menu,
"Manage Add-ons",) that maybe the data would display in some other format,
but I suspect it would still format it as some other sort of graphics, or
not at all.

Here's some "Flash" stuff from the internet, that may be of some use:

Shredding The Document: Capture that web page!
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/2008/08/capture_that_web_page.html
"Acrobat 9 does have limited ability to capture Flash content. By limited I
mean that it captures simple (non interactive) Flash content in a page but
does not capture more complex content such as entire web pages which have
been created in Flash. Media such as video on a web page is not captured."

(I think Acrobat also has some sort of OCR capability too.)

Adobe Flash - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash
"Many usability concerns regarding Flash concern how it breaks with
conventions associated with normal HTML pages. Things like selecting text,
scrollbars,[33] form control and right-clicking act differently than with a
regular HTML webpage."

Free Flash Web Capture Downloads
http://www.fileguru.com/apps/flash_web_capture
"Infine Capture Flash is a flash capture tool allows you to capture flash
files from all open web pages and temporary Internet files, and save flash
to disk in one second. You can preview each Flash. Free download of Infine
Capture Flash 1.6, size 1.68 Mb."

Well, I guess this thread has pretty much come to an end, unless someone
else reading these messages knows a more useful way to capture information
from Flash and convert it to text that Excel can use...?

FWIW. --Richard