How to Generate Stats and

Auto-Upload to Profile

Tutorial by Kyle Mills (ky.m.guy) Written September 2009

Requirements:

GSAK Software (www.gsak.net) Groundspeak™ Premium Membership

This tutorial was written as a guide on how to setup GSAK to automatically generate and upload accurate statistics to your GSAK profile. It assumes that you GSAK installed and have a basic idea of the GSAK user interface and of using

computers.If you have no clue how to use GSAK, you will probably find this tutorial very confusing and should probably read the help file here.

Section A: Getting and Installing the Required Macros

1) We will install the FindStatGen macro first. It is the main statistics macro. Click here to go to the download page on the GSAK forum.

2) Scroll down to the very bottom of this page and click the download link (shown below)

3) When prompted, select open 4) This will open GSAK with a message about installing, running or opening the macro (see below). Select

Install and click Go.

5) Click Cancel on the next page that shows up. We don’t need to use this yet. 6) Repeat steps 2-5 with this link. (The AddLogs.gsk macro) 7) Repeat steps 2-5 with this link. (The GenUploadStats.gsk macro) 8) Repeat steps 2-5 with this link. (The Ontario_County_Tagger.gsk macro)

SECTION B: Getting and Importing Data

Step A: Setting your Home Location and Method of matching:

1) Go to Tools>Options and select the “Locations” tab. 2) Insert a line that looks like this: Home, N43 55.890 W079 01.832 (substitute your home

coordinates.) 3) Go to the General tab 4) In the “Method for Matching” section, select “Owner ID” radio button and input your Owner ID

Number (To find this out, go to http://www.geocaching.com/account/ and look at your Member ID. 5) Press OK to save changes.

Step B: Create two new databases:

1) Click Database>New 2) Type “Found” in the Database Name box. 3) Click Create 4) Click Database>New 5) Type “Placed” in the Database Name box. 6) Click Create

Step C: Generate and Load your “My Finds” Pocket Query

1) Go to http://www.geocaching.com/pocket 2) Scroll down and find the area shown below. Click “Add to Queue” (NOTE: This will not work if you

already have five pocket queries that have run today.)

3) In a few minutes you will receive an email with a .zip file attached. Save this file to a location on your

computer. 4) In GSAK, click File > Load GPX/LOC/ZIP… 5) Setup the box that appears so that the yellow highlighted areas look like the image below. Press the

red highlighted button and locate the downloaded .zip file.

6) Press OK – GSAK will load the file into your “found” database.

Step D: Getting Data for your Placed caches

In order for your “placed” statistics to be accurate follow the instructions below. 1) Go to http://www.geocaching.com/pocket.

2) Click Create a new query. 3) Setup the pocket query using default settings except for the ones shown below.

4) Click 5) Click Return to List

6) Now click the check box under the current day for this pocket query (you will get an error message if you already have five check-marks under this day of the week)

7) This will generate the pocket query and email it to your email address. Now save the file and import it

just like you did in Section B, Step C, Item 5 (except select the Placed database instead of Found). 8) Now you have a database with all of your placed caches in it.

Note: Archived caches are not included in Pocket Queries. If you have placed caches that you have archived, you must go to the page and manually download and import the file into GSAK (into your Placed database) using the same settings as above (in item 7).

Step E: Setting Your Home Location and “Method for Matching”

In order for “closest cache”, “furthest cache” and other distance-related statistics to be correct, it is important to have your home coordinates set correctly. 1) In the GSAK toolbar, press Tools>Options. 2) Select the Locations tab. 3) Type a line in the list that looks like the line below (substitute your home coordinates)

Home, N56 27.456 W017 45.567

4) Now go to the General tab and select Owner ID# as your method for matching. 5) Go to www.geocaching.com/account 6) Log in 7) Look for your Owner ID# (Member ID)

8) Type this number in the box in the GSAK options:

9) Press OK

SECTION C: Using the Macros

Step A: AddLogs.gsk

There are several limitations to the geocaching website with respect to cache downloads. Each pocket query generated only contains the 5 most recent logs and each individual .GPX file downloaded from the cache page contains the 25 most recent. In order for you to have accurate “Placed” cache stats, you must have all of the cache’s logs in your “placed” database. The AddLogs macro adds missing logs to the selected geocache.

1) Switch to your Placed database (if not already there) – Database>Select>Placed>OK 2) Select the cache you wish to add logs to by single-clicking on it. 3) Click Macros (in the top toolbar) 4) Click Run/Manage… 5) The macro manager window will appear. Double-click on the AddLogs.gsk line. This will run that

macro. 6) Enter your username and password so that the macro can access the logs. Press Save. (Note: you only

have to perform this step on the very first macro run.)

7) A new window will appear: Select “Placed” as your first database to search. Leave the rest as-is. Click

Search. (Note: you only have to perform this step on the very first macro run.)

8) Just press OK in the next window. The macro will now download all missing logs.

9) Press OK on the statistical message that appears. 10) Click on the next cache you want to add logs for and repeat items 3, 4, 5, 8 & 9 above. 11) You must run the macro on all placed caches that you own for your statistics to be correct.

Step B: Ontario_County_Tagger.gsk and the Ontario Mao Data File

If you would like display the Ontario County Map in your statistics, you will need to run this macro on your found database. Here’s how:

1) Switch to your Found database (if not already there) – Database>Select>Found>OK 2) Click Macros (in the top toolbar) 3) Click Run/Manage… 4) The macro manager window will appear. Double-click on the Ontario_County_Tagger.gsk line. This

will run that macro. 5) Put a check-mark in the box that says “Overwrite all waypoints in database…” and press Proceed.

6) The macro will now tag all waypoints in Ontario with the correct county name.

7) In order for the map to appear, you need to download this file to your macro folder inside of your GSAK installation folder. To find this folder, in the GSAK toolbar, click Tools>GSAK Folder Finder, select Macros and press OK.

Step C: FindStatGen.gsk

You are now ready to run the FindStatGen macro.

1) Click Macros (in the top toolbar) 2) Click Run/Manage… 3) The macro manager window will appear. Double-click on the FindStatGen.gsk line. This will run that

macro. 4) Select Options. 5) Set Basic Options:

a. Select your Found database. b. Select your Placed database. c. Input a number in the milestone separation box. The macro will show every x number of caches

that you have found. d. Input a number in the FTF separation box. The macro will show every x number of caches that

you have got a first to find on. It will always include the most recent 10 FTFs e. Select your Home Location (see above for instructions on setting your home location) f. Select which colour you would like your statistics page to be. g. Select your language. h. Choose other options based on you preferences.

i. Excluding Locationless caches will make it so that locationless caches are not considered when generating statistics.

ii. Choose whether to show the difficulty/terrain chart. Selecting this will show this chart:

iii. Choose whether to show the cumulative finds chart. Selecting this will show this chart:

iv. Choose whether to use pie charts. If this is not selected, the statistics will display bar-graphs in place of pie charts.

v. If the Auto-run option is set, the macro will give you a ten second warning and then automatically generate statistics based on your last used settings. You can easily cancel the auto-run by clicking on the message that appears the next time you run the macro. For the purpose of this tutorial, please enable this option.

vi. Centering the output will make the statistics center-justified instead of left-justified. i. Ensure that your username is correct in the Username field. Incorrect names will not affect the

macro’s performance, it will just affect the appearance (The macro will use this username to “personalise” the statistics. ie: username has 10 finds on 10 unique geocaches.)

j. Choose whether or not to use shaded bars. Using shaded bars will give the bar graphs a 3D look.

k. Choose whether the statistics will be generated for use locally or remotely. If you are going to upload the statistics to the internet for others to view, choose remote. If you just want to view

the statistics on your computer only, select local. You can view remote statistics on your computer also as long as you have an internet connection available.

l. I recommend saving your settings, press SAVE under the settings group box now to save. 6) Set Advanced Options:

m. Notes: The notes section is a place for you to add any additional information about yourself like hobbies, a description about yourself, page counters, stat bars, etc. The notes section supports HTML but it is not necessary.

i. Write a title in the section you wish to use. This title will be displayed at the top of the notes (No HTML in the title).

n. Numbers: The numbers options allow you to choose which fields you will see under the “Some Numbers” option.

i. You can choose any options that you want. This section does not affect this tutorial. o. Special: This section allows you to recognise those caches that are special to you. You cannot

customize this option until the second time the macro is run. For instructions on how to use this advanced option, click here.

p. Maps: You can download and use custom maps with the macro such as county maps and additional maps for countries other than US, Canada and Australia. Click here for a library of all additional maps that have been created. You must place the downloaded file in the GSAK Macros folder.

For our use, please put a check beside the Ontario (full) option. q. Section Order: This controls the order in which the sections appear as well as which sections

appear.

i. Press the + or – buttons to move the sections up and down.

ii. Press to disable the section and to enable the section.

iii. If you have written notes, make sure that the Notes A and/or Notes B is . iv. If you have selected custom maps (like the Ontario County map that I created) make

sure that the Other Maps section is . r. Now save your settings again by pressing save as you did in step 2.

7) Press OK to generate statistics. 8) Just close the statistics that the macro generates for now

Step D: GenUploadStats.gsk

**CAUTION** This macro will erase the information that you previously have in the Geocaching.com profile page. If you have information in this profile area which you would like to preserve, copy it to the Notes section of the FindStatsGen macro.

1) Click Macros (in the top toolbar) 2) Click Run/Manage… 3) The macro manager window will appear. Double-click on the GenUploadStats.gsk line. This will run

that macro. 4) Input the information required (Username and Password). This is required so that the macro can log

into your profile and change your statistics. 5) If you saved your settings in the FindStatGen macro, select the number that you saved them as. If you

are unsure, just select 1. Chances are it will work.

6) The macro will now call up the FindStatGen macro that you have installed and configured and will

upload them to your profile page.

SECTION D: Keeping Your Statistics Up-to-Date To keep your statistics up-to-date, keep a regular pocket query that gives to your placed caches running weekly. About once per month, run the AddLogs macro on the caches in the placed database to catch any logs that may have slipped through the pocket queries. Import your “My Finds” pocket query into your GSAK “Found” database regularily also and run the Ontario_County_Tagger macro in order for the map to be updated as new finds will not be automatically tagged. From now on, to update your statistics, all you have to do is run the GenUploadStats macro. A shortcut to the macro management directory is Ctrl+M. Have fun!

Tutorial written by ky.m.guy (Kyle Mills) in September 2009.