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Handling thousands of records by Exporting to TXT
If you've ever run a litigation
search for a major corporation such as GE Credit, CL&P, Metro-North or a
major hospital such as Stamford Hospital or Yale New-Haven, you know the
number of records found in the Court PC database can easily reach into
the thousands. So you now have an enormous number of matching
records. How are you going to manage or present them? My
suggestion is to consider exporting the data to a TXT file for use in
Microsoft Excel or Access.
With data mapping and mining
software like Datawatch's Monarch or SAP's Crystal Reports, you can easily convert that
TXT file for use with MS-Excel, to sort and filter the records as needed.
Of course, not everyone has these tools available.
If you don't, e-mail one or more TXT files to Court PC, and I'll
convert it to an MS-Excel workbook or MS-Access database for you.
If you don't have MS-Excel or
Access, you can still open and use either of these file formats with
most other free or open source spreadsheet or database programs, such as
Google Drive's Sheets (go to http://www.google.com/drive) or
Apache OpenOffice
Calc or
Base.
Cost
Your cost is $20 per Excel workbook
or Access database. Please note that one Excel workbook can have
several worksheets and one Access database can have many data tables.
Each TXT file you e-mail will appear in a separate worksheet or table,
and all of those will be bundled into one workbook or database.
The cost is $20 per workbook or database, not $20 per TXT file
processed.
How it works
Let's say we start with a search for
the name YALE NEW for all records matching Yale New Haven Hospital.
Without filtering out older records, plaintiff records, etc., the total
number of matching records found in our database was 10,008 records.
To get started, here's an image of
the first few resulting records. Above and right of the dark grey table header is a
pull-down box allowing you to select the Export to TXT function.
You need to highlight the TXT option and click on the word "Export"
A small dialog box
will appear indicating that the results will be saved to the file "cvfaresults.txt"
in your Downloads folder. Select "Save File" and wait for
the download to complete. This file of 10,000 records was about
2.5MB in size, and is quickly downloaded, depending upon your connection
speed.
When you open
cvfaresults.txt using Wordpad, Notepad or another simple text editor, you'll see
what looks like the usual results table minus the gray bars and the bold
text.
A data mapping and
extraction program opens the file in its native format, just as Notepad
does. I use Monarch for all Court PC data extraction tasks.
The text file looks exactly the same when you first open it in Monarch.
Monarch or any other
data mining program will require you to model the data by defining which
text and fields you want extracted. I've looked at a lot of apps
and utilities that mine data, and Monarch is by far the easiest and most
intuitive to use. After the data template has been defined and
saved, Monarch "paints" the text to be extracted, as shown below:
Notice that the
third line of the fifth record has a different field position for the
"Status" info than the first four records. Monarch can use a
"floating trap" to catch certain data wherever it appears in a line of
text. This is one more reason why a data mining program is
required for this task.
The next step
requires changing the view to a "Table" view where you can see the text
data in tabular form. From here the data is exported to your
specified format. These will most often be MS-Excel worksheets or
an MS-Access database.
The same data as it
now appears in Excel.
Excel enables you to
sort and/or filter the data on any column, such as Location, Case type,
Disposition, Return Date or Disposition Date. You can also use it
to modify repetitive text, e.g., substitute "P" for all instances
of the word "PLAINTIFF' or "NH" for "NEW HAVEN JD." It also affords the
option for analysis across two fields, such as calculating the length of
time between the Return Date and the Disposition Date. All of the
same functions are also available in Access, but I use Excel for this example
because it is probably more widely used.
Why don't Party Name
Search reports export to Excel directly?
If you've used the
Search Appearances by Juris Number or Search by Multiple Criteria
searches on the Court PC database, you know that the results are
exportable directly to Excel. Why don't Party Name Search results
export directly to Excel? The answer lies in the report structure.
Party Name Search results appear in a free-form multi-line report, which
lends itself better to an export to TXT files where the formatting is
retained. Appearance and Multiple Criteria report results are
shown in a tabular format, with one line per record, which is converted
to a comma-separated values (CSV) text. CSV files can be imported
seamlessly into Excel without formatting problems.
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Posted: February 2014 