Rick Moll's
Cycling Power Meter Tools
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I just recently begin developing some of my own Excel tools for analyzing my PowertapTM data files. I'm doing this mostly just because I find it fun, almost magical, to collect the data from a ride, and to then process the data to turn it into information that hopefully will show you to how to improve, or to at least better understand your weaknesses.

If you think this is nuts, when there are lots of perfectly fine (if not great) programs for doing this already out there, here's my take on why even you may want to do this.

Otherwse, here's my current collection of tools. If you have suggestions or other feedback, feel free to send me email: rickmoll@earthlink.net

Batch PT CSV: is my first pass at a tool for batch processing PowertapTM CSV (Comma Separated Values) files.

To use, edit the folder path in cell B4 and click the "Find CSV Files" button. The folder will be searched, and the CSV files will be listed in the worksheet (what's a CSV file?). You can also edit the default ".csv" file name filter in cell B5, to limit the file names searched. As the files are found, an attempt is also made to parse the filenames into ride date, ride multiple, and rider name.

The "Process CSV Files" button can then be clicked to process all the listed CSV files. For now the "processing" is to simply list the file's status, units used, whether date/timestamp data was found, recording rate, whether gaps were found, ride duration, total energy produced, and average power output.

As I said, this is simply a "first pass", but the macros do demonstrate how to search a folder for CSV files, read them, and do some simple processing. In particular, it demonstrates how to read the files and process them as a VBA array of "Double" (floating point) data, as opposed to processing the data directly in worksheet cells. Processing the data this way is what really makes batch processing the CSV files feasible, since it would otherwise be too time intensive.

CP Analysis: this is just my version of a Critical Power spreadsheet that takes advantage of the List feature in Excel 2003. You can edit the Critical Power data or the durations at which you wish to predict power and the associated charts are automatically updated. For an introduction to Critical Power see Andy Coggan's article: http://www.midweekclub.ca/articles/coggan.pdf
MMP Play: this lets you play around with a simple algorithm I came up with (although I'm sure I wasn't the first to think of it) that calculates a Maximal Mean Power curve. There is a small 50 cell spreadsheet in which you can manually create a power curve, and by clicking a button, the corresponding Maximal Mean Power curve is charted.
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