Hey friends, my LCS is apparently having a mess of a time trying to coordinate/corral their growing hordes of subs (they were recently averaging a new sub a day) who haphazardly tell them they want books (inevitably after FOC it seems). He wanted to find a good checkbox method for having people tell him what they wanted… in enough time, but today on the weekly “here’s what’s coming this week” email he said he hadn’t found anything. I feel for the guy, he seems a bit overwhelmed with the new subs and it’s a collectibles shop with a decent amount of comics (so lots of balls in the air).
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does something like this exist (that is more helpful than the Previews printable FOC pdf)?
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assuming there’s no good answer to 1 already available, I’ve designed something that I might be able to give him, but… I’m not sure it’s easy enough for any random non-tinkerer like me. So, my real question is: how do I automate the following process better?
The process:
- I run a scraping program I set up using ParseHub. It was relatively easy for me to set something up for scraping the FOC site. The same could easily be done for the “coming this week” section of Previews. (and, DC is a problem, but eh, let’s get the easy part out of the way first)
- This scraped data can be imported, after some excel trickery to turn multiple columns into a single column, into a google form checkbox question.
- This form can be sent to users, who check the boxes of the items they want ordered on their behalf.
- The output of the form is this unwieldy mess (where every selected item is in one cell):
- I can clean up the offending cell using “split text to columns”:
But my goodness, not only is this annoying, it’s a million steps. I’m just your friendly neighborhood chemist, but is there a way to take these work flows and make them not awful?