Issue with PGO lite - MDB exporting

[elc32955]

Hi Wilson!

First, let me thank you for making PGO and PGO lite available. This software fills a void in that with Yahoo Groups, there's gobs and gobs of folks that have been using this system for a very long time that, shortly, will be faced with trying to retrieve their information from an unfriendly provider. 

The first issue I've run into may be a intentional software limitation though. I'm using lite to export message traffic from a Yahoo Group that has roughly 22,000 messages. I was able on the first try (a few days ago) to get the messages from my group into lite in one session. Where the problem occurred was two-fold. One, I tried to export the messages to a MDB file using the program menu and was only succesful in getting lite to send only the first 101 messages. However, since I was exporting only one specific group I was able to copy the raw MDB file directly from the program which contained all messages from the group so that problem was resolved.

Now. I wanted to convert the MDB file to a CSV comma delimited file so I could use it to import into a PHPbb program (preserving the group messages). When I did the conversion using Excel 2010, between 30 and 40% of the message dates dropped out (just displayed "######" in the exported file). Is this a normal product of the export or is there something specific in the coding of the mdb database that would cause this to your knowledge? The raw MDB file was about 160MB, after exporting just the one table with the messages the final product was about 57mb in size.

BTW, I tried using the full demo version of 4 and it would not find anything on the very same group. No pictures, no messages. But lite worked fine under identical parameters. I still need to get the pictures out of the group, so I was wondering why lite worked and the full feature version didn't with the same identical group. That didn't make sense to me. I know about the neo formatting problems and was very pleased lite picked up right away on the first attempt.

Thanks very much!
Eric

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Eric,

I'm surprised anything worked frankly.

Neo is a huge PITA.

Anyway, if you can view the dates in Excel then they're definitely there.

Be careful viewing things like dates. If your viewing field is not large enough you'll see odd things.

Try isolating a group of messages (maybe 100) where some work & some don't. Make a separate MDB of them & try to export just them to a CSV and see what happens.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[casstk]

In the new Neo-enabled version, will there be an export to MDB option?

[Wilson Logan]

I don't think so but there are lots of free tools to convert from one database format to another.

I haven't check but you may even be able to import SQLite databases directly into MS Access.

[casstk]

Thanks, I've tested the db3 dfile with Access and had no luck,. Same with Open Office. If anyone knows of one that works with the PG offline files, let me know. And if i find one I'll post here.

[Wilson Logan]

You might try looking for a SQLite tool which can export db3 files as .csv  (or .sql?)

MS Access can accept .csv

Cheers,

Wilson.

[casstk]

Thank you. SQL Llite did export the database files. Oddly the text is in numerical strings, while the subject headers are in text. Not quite sure how to proceed from here.

[txpigeon]

I'm using one named sqlitestudio-2.1.4.exe that I found online.  It was in a zip file.  Don't remember where I found it, but everything looks like it should and exports fine.

Duane