Use Excel with Basecamp

[Homefire]

With the rally season rapidly approaching, I’d been thinking about how to to do better this year (other than somehow getting my Super Sherpa to go faster up hills and upwind). After a dreadful attempt to use a laptop and BaseCamp during the Harvest Rally, I thought it would be more efficient to enter bonus info into Excel as waypoints and then moving them to BaseCamp for route planning and loading the GPS unit. Unfortunately there was no identifiable way to do the transfer. Basecamp pretty much wants to import a GPX file and Excel didn’t export one. Until now.

I’ve prepared an Excel spreadsheet that exports waypoint info into a GPX file that BaseCamp can import. In addition, it provides for coding the waypoints with different icons and obtaining lat/long values for each location.

So how does this help efficiency? In the first test, I entered 56 bonus locations from the Harvest Rally, assigned waypoint icons based on bonus points, obtained lat/long values, exported the waypoints to a GPX file, and imported the file into BaseCamp in under 45 minutes. Of course you still have to plan the route, transfer it to the GPS unit and execute it.

The program is called Boni-Prep and can be downloaded from http://turnlink.net. It works with Windows and newer Mac versions of Excel.

I have high hopes that this will be useful in real world rally use. Please let me know what you think, especially if you currently use another computer aid for planning.

[propforward]

I'll definitely give this a try. Thanks for the link!

[Homefire]

Can someone report if Streets & Trips also imports GPX files? If it does, then Boni-Prep should work equally well with it, although S&T may have different names for the waypoint icons it uses.

[LSGiant]

Streets and Trips up to 2010 exports to GPX just fine after that there is a bug that requires file manipulation.

[Homefire]

I suppose that if it exports to GPX, it would likely import a GPX file of waypoints. If you have Excel, could you try exporting the Harvest rally waypoints in the sample Boni-Prep spreadsheet and then import into S&T? The waypoints are entered, ready to export.

[Homefire]

With the Bonzi Rally rapidly approaching, the Bonii-Prep program v1.3 has been posted at http://turnlink.net. A table of point values has been added to simplify assignment of map symbols, and data entry areas have been color coded for visual clarity. For review, Bonii-Prep allows you to enter bonus information into an Excel spreadsheet and export it as waypoints for import into Basecamp. It allows for coding waypoint names and symbols.

[propforward]

Thanks Charles. I played with this a bit yesterday - seems very straightforward. I will have another go when the Bonzai Bonii are released. Seems to me that it should be a bit quicker and less cumbersome than the normal approach of "click somewhere and edit the way point coordinates" method of entering into basecamp.

[Homefire]

You could practice using Bonii-Prep with the bonus list from the 2013 Bonzi that is available here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1966...202013.pdf
It doesn't have any bonus points, but you can make some up as you enter the locations, or enter them later as happens in the actual rally.

-Charles