This tutorial is mainly for XPATH use within EditGrid and complements the REGEX tutorial - which gives working examples of 'Web scraping' by HTML table, ordered/unordered list's or from Comma Separated List (.csv) , tab separated values (.tsv) webpages.

The web_csv examples includes obtaining groups of values from Editgrid workbooks using a combination of URL and csv column selection.

This spreadsheet lists all historical Bank of England (UK) base rates since January 1975 to 16 January 2008. Col A2 onwards has the date for the rate and B2 onwards is the rate on the day. Also included are recent bank of england base rate tables and charts.
[Its Tiny URL identifier is "yuyuev"
i.e. "http://tinyurl.com/yuyuev"]

HISTORY OF SPREADSHEETS - WORKS RECORDS SYSTEM at ICI 1974
This Spreadsheet (mainly of images) documents part of the true history of Spreadsheets - The "Works Records System" , an interactive 3D & multi-user spreadsheet application as implemented at ICI Ltd. in Northwich, Cheshire, UK in 1974.

(This is 5/6 years before "Visicalc" and the documents are copies of the original documentation from 1974 with comments to relate to modern spreadsheet terminology.)

The System was designed by Dr. Robert Mais, an employee of ICI. It's kernel was programmed by Ken Dakin *, an independent consultant who went on to produce & market interactive test/debugging & storage protection systems ("OLIVER"** & "SIMON"***) for IBM users - in particular enterprise critical CICS systems that were essential (& time sensitive) applications for major IBM customers such as International Banks and Insurance companies during the 80's and 90's.


For the advanced spreadsheet application; Incremental Compiler, "Memoization" & Just-in-time compiler techniques were all employed in its implementation many years before these terms were even coined. It was still operational in 2001 and had been in constant use for 27 years without change.

Multiple users could work on and display historical and predicted data simultaneously, based upon a retained ADABAS database that grew organically as data was entered. Backup was automatic and security built-in, from the outset.

Cells were essentially 'named' and global in nature and could be utilized in any other application on the same network.
[Notes:
*1 Later system software called "WARP" was developed & launched by the same author, only for the trademark to be subsequently & knowingly hijacked by IBM for PC marketing purposes against Microsoft's "WINDOWS" operating system, resulting in a seven year court battle held in the "Tribunal de grande instance", Paris, France and culminating in IBM eliminating the opposition using gross "fundamental inexactitudes" of a most profane variety - including, but not limited to, describing the WARP performance enhancing software as effectively "vapor-ware" - despite definitive proof of its genuine efficacy by a jointly appointed expert witness called during detailed benchmark trials during the period 1994-2000 [16.5.1997,77 Rev. Droite de propriété Industrielle(1997),46 - Sté PANEK v. Sté IBM Corp. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Jurisdiction/Geller_Full.html])
**2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_OLIVER_(CICS_interactive_test/debug)
***3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMON_(Batch_Interactive_test/debug)
]

This spreadsheet lists more than 500 Colors and shows the 6 digit 'hexadecimal' code, in column G, required to specify the color to many applications including Text2image. It also shows the R/G/B decimal values required in other applications/languages.

Using a WEB function, selected color specifications can selectively be 'fetched' from this spreadsheet to cover the specific requirements of a user, without having to specify the hex code itself, using instead a relative color number which also matches the row number in the sheet.

Examples of Permalink's to access certain colors:-

"http://www.editgrid/user/ken/LIST_OF_COLORS/Sheet1!G423" fetches hexadecimal value FF0000 (red),

cell reference G223 fetches 00FF00 (Green) ,
cell reference G96 fetches 0000FF (Blue).

There is a second sheet called "Websafe" which is similar to Sheet1 in column layout but only shows around 200 colors that are "web-safe" for most browsers and monitors. The colours start in row 2 but relative color numbers in column A start at 1002 so as to retain unique color numbering across both sheets. There is a little overlap between the sheets.