Being nosey... How many Regular Saver accounts do you have?

deinoflex

Kim_13 said:

List each declared number once and the names of forumites it applies to in a column beside it?

I thought this was the best idea to save space. 

Ch1ll1Phlakes

Bobblehat said:

I should explain what the problem is I'm trying to solve (or head off).

As the table has grown, so has the size of the image file I insert into the post. A couple of weeks back I hit a forum "limit" when I tried to insert an updated image and I had to "resize" the image to lower the file size (~200KB) before the insert process accepted the image. Resizing the image lowered the readability of the text in the table as it reduced the apparent size of the font, and its "clarity". I'm not sure what property of the image is causing the rejection of the insert, is it the file size, file type, aspect ratio of the image, or something else?

A week or so ago, the table having grown again, I had to repeat the process and the text got slightly "fuzzier" again as I tried to keep the image file under the limit. I realised that this solution was not going to be repeatable for too many iterations. 

So one solution I thought of was the splitting of the image into several smaller images, such that each one was well within the forum insert limit .... this lead on to the "Divisions" idea.

I'm not dead set on that route if a better solution to the problem can be found, and there may well be forumites who have solved a similar problem here (or elsewhere), or can think outside the box and suggest an alternative solution. As I said a few posts back, the "Division" solution was just my initial thoughts and has a possible advantage of breaking up a long, thin image (and may get even longer!) which requires a good deal of scrolling to view.

All suggestions welcome.

I think your divisions idea is good. It keeps the table personal which unfortunately a table reporting the number of forumites for each number of regular savers won't do.

You probably will find that divisions will require a set number of forumites rather than set ranges i.e. 20 forumites vs 0-9 regular savers as it'll end up with one large division for the smaller numbers of regular savers and loads of small divisions for the higher numbers. That's at the moment anyway. If in the future there were 200 forumites reporting the divisions would probably work better with the set ranges.

Like every football league relegations and promotions are possible. This mightn't be favourable but would allow for new additions to be added or for forumites to have their report removed from the table.

One suggestion I will give at the moment is using the same table as current but upload the image in two halves. This should keep the image size lower but also allow for upload in a higher clarity. It won't require divisions just upload the second half of the table immediately after the first picture. Screenshots should allow you to do this as I've never had a screenshot upload rejected by the forum. Just my suggestions anyway. Have quite enjoyed this thread so far will be glad for it to continue.

Bobblehat

Kim_13 said:

Bobblehat said:

saverkev said:

I'm plus 1 with Progressive - 27 total  £6510 per month - however my Skipton RS matures 7th Nov and I won't be renewing unless it goes over 6% (Base Rate tracker account). But! - waiting hopefully for Scottish BS online RS and Principality Christmas RS while also waiting to hopefully renew current Principality Christmas into another  RS4 (Giving instructions online tomorrow afternoon - As usual last Saturday before maturity wearing Red shirt going for option 4 - never failed yet! - that's probably put the mockers on it!
This thread opened my eyes to one salient fact - where else can i get well over 6% savings interest on £36k with the money not all tied down for a too long a period - in fact a large amount instantly available should the need arise.

Yeah! I'm expecting quite a few updates in the next few weeks (if contributors remember to update their stats), due to recent offerings  .

I'm liking the feedback from several forumites about how this thread has encouraged further RS endeavours (I'm not the OP, so not trying to claim any kudos on this issue). Happy to carry on doing the documentation no matter how small an addition or amendment.

A thought has occurred to me that the "League Table" is becoming quite long and I have pondered on how it could soon become unwieldy in terms of presentation, and what possible solutions could alleviate that. One solution occurred to me .... splitting it into "Divisions", à la Football League. I understand that could prove unpopular if new contributors popped up, or existing contributors added a handful of new RS's, and relegated others on a trickle down basis, causing a decrease in the "fun" element of the League for some!

That solution has an additional problem of how to set the "Division" boundaries. If I followed a Football analogy of a fixed number of forumites in a division, the number of divisions would grow as new "teams" joined in. Or I could set the Divisions by order of magnitude of RS's (base 10) ... so 0-9, 10-19, 20-29 etc. with a variable number of "teams" per division.

These are just my preliminary thoughts and welcome your ideas and suggestions ... even if it's "leave it how it is"!

List each declared number once and the names of forumites it applies to in a column beside it?

deinoflex said:

Kim_13 said:

List each declared number once and the names of forumites it applies to in a column beside it?

I thought this was the best idea to save space. 

Where would the PM, Value and Return data go? Could I end up swapping the problem to one of width rather than length?

Ch1ll1Phlakes

Also don't want to step on anyone's toes but here's an example.



Not perfect saying I downloaded the most up to date pic but works ok. Hope this helps.

Bobblehat

Ch1ll1Phlakes said:

Bobblehat said:

I should explain what the problem is I'm trying to solve (or head off).

As the table has grown, so has the size of the image file I insert into the post. A couple of weeks back I hit a forum "limit" when I tried to insert an updated image and I had to "resize" the image to lower the file size (~200KB) before the insert process accepted the image. Resizing the image lowered the readability of the text in the table as it reduced the apparent size of the font, and its "clarity". I'm not sure what property of the image is causing the rejection of the insert, is it the file size, file type, aspect ratio of the image, or something else?

A week or so ago, the table having grown again, I had to repeat the process and the text got slightly "fuzzier" again as I tried to keep the image file under the limit. I realised that this solution was not going to be repeatable for too many iterations. 

So one solution I thought of was the splitting of the image into several smaller images, such that each one was well within the forum insert limit .... this lead on to the "Divisions" idea.

I'm not dead set on that route if a better solution to the problem can be found, and there may well be forumites who have solved a similar problem here (or elsewhere), or can think outside the box and suggest an alternative solution. As I said a few posts back, the "Division" solution was just my initial thoughts and has a possible advantage of breaking up a long, thin image (and may get even longer!) which requires a good deal of scrolling to view.

All suggestions welcome.

I think your divisions idea is good. It keeps the table personal which unfortunately a table reporting the number of forumites for each number of regular savers won't do.

You probably will find that divisions will require a set number of forumites rather than set ranges i.e. 20 forumites vs 0-9 regular savers as it'll end up with one large division for the smaller numbers of regular savers and loads of small divisions for the higher numbers. That's at the moment anyway. If in the future there were 200 forumites reporting the divisions would probably work better with the set ranges.

Like every football league relegations and promotions are possible. This mightn't be favourable but would allow for new additions to be added or for forumites to have their report removed from the table.

One suggestion I will give at the moment is using the same table as current but upload the image in two halves. This should keep the image size lower but also allow for upload in a higher clarity. It won't require divisions just upload the second half of the table immediately after the first picture. Screenshots should allow you to do this as I've never had a screenshot upload rejected by the forum. Just my suggestions anyway. Have quite enjoyed this thread so far will be glad for it to continue.

I had also thought of just leaving the structure as it is, but splitting the image into 2 or more sections. I'm not sure how the insert function would line up the multiple images and might produce an "offset" half-table. It was this (Edit: potential) problem that lead onto my "Division" split idea 

I could experiment and see if it works?

Ch1ll1Phlakes

Bobblehat said:

Ch1ll1Phlakes said:

Bobblehat said:

I should explain what the problem is I'm trying to solve (or head off).

As the table has grown, so has the size of the image file I insert into the post. A couple of weeks back I hit a forum "limit" when I tried to insert an updated image and I had to "resize" the image to lower the file size (~200KB) before the insert process accepted the image. Resizing the image lowered the readability of the text in the table as it reduced the apparent size of the font, and its "clarity". I'm not sure what property of the image is causing the rejection of the insert, is it the file size, file type, aspect ratio of the image, or something else?

A week or so ago, the table having grown again, I had to repeat the process and the text got slightly "fuzzier" again as I tried to keep the image file under the limit. I realised that this solution was not going to be repeatable for too many iterations. 

So one solution I thought of was the splitting of the image into several smaller images, such that each one was well within the forum insert limit .... this lead on to the "Divisions" idea.

I'm not dead set on that route if a better solution to the problem can be found, and there may well be forumites who have solved a similar problem here (or elsewhere), or can think outside the box and suggest an alternative solution. As I said a few posts back, the "Division" solution was just my initial thoughts and has a possible advantage of breaking up a long, thin image (and may get even longer!) which requires a good deal of scrolling to view.

All suggestions welcome.

I think your divisions idea is good. It keeps the table personal which unfortunately a table reporting the number of forumites for each number of regular savers won't do.

You probably will find that divisions will require a set number of forumites rather than set ranges i.e. 20 forumites vs 0-9 regular savers as it'll end up with one large division for the smaller numbers of regular savers and loads of small divisions for the higher numbers. That's at the moment anyway. If in the future there were 200 forumites reporting the divisions would probably work better with the set ranges.

Like every football league relegations and promotions are possible. This mightn't be favourable but would allow for new additions to be added or for forumites to have their report removed from the table.

One suggestion I will give at the moment is using the same table as current but upload the image in two halves. This should keep the image size lower but also allow for upload in a higher clarity. It won't require divisions just upload the second half of the table immediately after the first picture. Screenshots should allow you to do this as I've never had a screenshot upload rejected by the forum. Just my suggestions anyway. Have quite enjoyed this thread so far will be glad for it to continue.

I had also thought of just leaving the structure as it is, but splitting the image into 2 or more sections. I'm not sure how the insert function would line up the multiple images and might produce an "offset" half-table. It was this problem that lead onto my "Division" split idea 

I could experiment and see if it works?

Hopefully my example above gives you the idea though I don't know fi there's any way to tighten the images together though you could always due readd the headings (though I suppose that is just making very generic divisions). 

Bobblehat

Ch1ll1Phlakes said:

Also don't want to step on anyone's toes but here's an example.



Not perfect saying I downloaded the most up to date pic but works ok. Hope this helps.

Yes ... it does help. Saved me from trying what you just did ... so big thanks.

How do people like this solution? Better than "Divisions"?

janusd

Bobblehat said:

I should explain what the problem is I'm trying to solve (or head off).

As the table has grown, so has the size of the image file I insert into the post. A couple of weeks back I hit a forum "limit" when I tried to insert an updated image and I had to "resize" the image to lower the file size (~200KB) before the insert process accepted the image. Resizing the image lowered the readability of the text in the table as it reduced the apparent size of the font, and its "clarity". I'm not sure what property of the image is causing the rejection of the insert, is it the file size, file type, aspect ratio of the image, or something else?

A week or so ago, the table having grown again, I had to repeat the process and the text got slightly "fuzzier" again as I tried to keep the image file under the limit. I realised that this solution was not going to be repeatable for too many iterations. 

So one solution I thought of was the splitting of the image into several smaller images, such that each one was well within the forum insert limit .... this lead on to the "Divisions" idea.

I'm not dead set on that route if a better solution to the problem can be found, and there may well be forumites who have solved a similar problem here (or elsewhere), or can think outside the box and suggest an alternative solution. As I said a few posts back, the "Division" solution was just my initial thoughts and has a possible advantage of breaking up a long, thin image (and may get even longer!) which requires a good deal of scrolling to view.

All suggestions welcome.

a couple of thoughts...

1. could you not upload the image externally, e.g postimages.org and then use the direct link URL of the uploaded image in your post rather than uploading the images directly at mse forums ? that should bypass whatever upload issues you're running into here..

2. what format is the table created in? i'm just wondering if copy & paste could be a viable option?

I just created a dummy table in Excel, and if I copy & paste it into here, then I get this...

Forumite	Count	Per Month	Value	Return
exel1966	76
RosieRooBear + hubby	72
surreysaver	54			2500
janusd	19	6000	2600	>1800

that's not really practical or visually clear, but if you them manually centre the values of the cells in the last four columns (cell by cell - pita), it does become clearer...

Forumite	Count	Per Month	Value	Return
exel1966	76
RosieRooBear + hubby	72
surreysaver	54			2500
janusd	19	6000	2600	>1800

there is also the option of using a converter to change your code into either HTML or Markdown... you would just need to copy & paste your excel table into the page, and it can convert it to various formats...

so if you wanted to post a html table, then you just take the code provided by the above, enable the html view toggle above and paste the code in...

Forumite	Count	Per Month	Value	Return
exel1966	76
RosieRooBear + hubby	72
surreysaver	54			2500
janusd	19	6000	2600	>1800

alternatively, if you used Markdown as the output option, you would again enable html view toggle, manually enter < p r e > (remove spaces - just pre with angle brackets!) then paste the markdown code and finish with a closing < / p r e > (again remove spaces) after the markdown - it should look like this...

| Forumite             | Count  | PM   | Value | Return |
|:--------------------:|:------:|:----:|:-----:|:------:|
| exel1966             | 76     |      |       |        |
| RosieRooBear + hubby | 72     |      |       |        |
| surreysaver          | 54     |      |       | 2500   |
| janusd               | 19     | 6000 | 2600  | >1800  |

that may sound horrendous, but it's just copy & pasting from the spreadsheet to the converter and then the resulting code into the forum post... it might take a few goes to get it right, but it would remove the hassle of dealing with images, leagues, divisions, European places, play-offs etc. 

Bobblehat

After Ch1ll1Phlakes experiment, I thought I'd see what the table would look like being generated directly from the spreadsheet (instead of coped from the forum) ....



Edit: Apart from the gap (which is not a blank line), I'd say this simple solution does the job! If the table were to expand to 3 figures of contributors in the future, I'd say this method will cope and provide a perfectly readable table.

p.s. Sorry Ch1lliPhlakes, it's pure coincidence that the split put you at the bottom of section 1. I feel slightly guilty about this after your help   

Ch1ll1Phlakes

Bobblehat said:

After Ch1ll1Phlakes experiment, I thought I'd see what the table would look like being generated directly from the spreadsheet (instead of coped from the forum) ....



Edit: Apart from the gap (which is not a blank line), I'd say this simple solution does the job! If the table were to expand to 3 figures of contributors in the future, I'd say this method will cope and provide a perfectly readable table.

p.s. Sorry Ch1lliPhlakes, it's pure coincidence that the split put you at the bottom of section 1. I feel slightly guilty about this after your help   

Looks good. Can always change as needed but hopefully the simple solution works for a while. Thanks for maintaining the table, and no problem the way I see it is it looks like I may need a few more accounts if I'm to stay in the top half 

EDIT: Funny that quoting a previous post actually groups the pictures closer together and making the table that bit slightly more readable.