Sorting 'Content' report

Hi,

I'm new to Clicky, but love it, its great!

When I look at the 'Content' report (i.e pages visited in the day) is there a way to sort these alphabetically? And can I change the number of entries on a page so I don't have to keep clicking 'next page'?

Thanks a lot,

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

Short Answer...

- Clicky reports are very convenient but not very flexible.

- If you want to play with the Clicky data on your own, then exporting data is the way to go.

- It's very easy to export Clicky reports with a single click and load them into your favorite spreadsheet where you can sort, slice, and dice it any way you need to.

- If you have MS Excel then definitely use XML instead of CSV because it's quicker than importing CSV, creates a beautiful and functional spreadsheet, and has all the data you get with CSV.

- If you don't have MS Excel and you want to do spreadsheet analysis then import CSV into OpenOffice Calc.


Detailed Discussion...

I don't know how to alter the sort order on the content page nor the number of entries listed per page. I find the Clicky development team has usually provided a thoughtful display for each report they offer with the added capability to either export the report data or else use the API calls to pull data out of clicky for further analysis using off line tools like my favorite slicer & dicer which is MS Excel.

The API to Clicky is not as intimidating as it sounds. You don't have to be a programmer to use the API, since each API call is essentially a URL that returns data in a format you get to choose. There are lots of examples in the API help pages so you can start from a working template and customize it as needed. I have played with the API in the past to assemble a query that returns an xml file of selected data without too much effort. But if you aren't inclined to play with the API, then you can still do a lot by simply exporting the reports that are already provided by Clicky.

You can do some off line analysis in your favorite spreadsheet. Getting the data is very easy by simply exporting the Content report. Do this by clicking on the little floppy disk icon on the right side of the column headers, then choose the export format you want to work with.

1. If you just want a scrollable report that looks just like the report on the web page, then export as pdf. This will give you a paginated report of all the pages; however it's a textual report and none of the items on the report are clickable links like they are on the web page report. Nice thing is you have a pdf snapshot of your report data that you can simply scroll through without having to keep clicking a NEXT link to view a page at a time.

2. If you want to do some more interesting sorting, filtering, and other analysis using MS Excel, you can export the Clicky report as XML. Then open the exported XML file using MS Excel. When you open the XML file, Excel will ask if you want it to automatically build an XML table using the input file. Answer yes, and easy as that you get the whole report loaded into an Excel spreadsheet. At that point you have all the capabilities of Excel to sort, slice, and dice the report data. Plus, the links on the web page report are preserved in the Excel spreadsheet so they are clickable to pull up the Clicky detail reports just like on the original web page report.

3. if you don't have Excel or you just want the raw data to play with, then you could export the report as a CSV file and import that CSV file into virtually any spreadsheet program. But it takes extra steps to go through the import dialog, then you have to manually format each of the columns, and the URLs are not clickable links.

I have to say that if you have Excel then importing an XML file is much quicker and easier than importing CSV, plus it results in a beautifully formatted table that is ready to start working with.

If you need to stick with a free solution, then you can play with OpenOffice Calc which is a powerful free spreadsheet. I tried a quick experiment to import the XML report file into OpenOffice Calc, but it did not automatically offer to build the spreadsheet from the XML file like Excel did. So in my experiment I was limited to CSV for OpenOffice Calc. (btw, a quick google of "how to open xml files in openoffice calc" yielded a discussion forum solution that talks about creating xslt filters to tell OpenOffice Calc how to build the table. That's more than I can mess with in answering this question, but I wanted to make you aware in case you are interested to pursue that on your own.)

I know it seems like a simple thing to ask for sorts on columns in a web formatted report, and perhaps someday the Clicky team will redo their reports using widgets that have these kinds of things built in. In the mean time, whatever the Clicky development team didn't provide in preformatted web reports, they more than made up for in APIs and export capabilities so we can pull any data we want and work with it using off line analysis tools.

hth

Thanks v much for the quick reply and all the info. I have Excel so will go that route.
Kind regards,
Jonathan