OK, I am now VERY happy with VeloHero. Here is the email communication I had with the developer (he first responded two hours after my email through the contact form and this was all in one day...)
Me
Hi there,
I have just joined VeloHero as my current service (mycyclinglog.com) is very flaky at times and the developer does not respond to questions.
I have uploaded all my rides from this year - 30ish was not too bad and I still had the GPXes - but I would love to be able to import, in bulk from my spreadsheet, my previous years' rides. This amounts to 83,000km in six years, so you can see there is no way I can do this manually (2,500ish lines). Is this likely to be a feature in the near future?
My Velo Hero user name is Auntie_Helen
Thanks!
Please wait a bit. I am developing an Excel macro. So you can import all sums of your workout. When I'm done I post a message on Facebook and Twitter.
With sporty regards
Nils
This is very good news, thank you for responding so quickly!
Auntie Helen
In the appendix you will find a small Excel tool. You can use it to import your old data.
Regards
Nils
(by 'Appendix' he meant attachment, he is German. The attachment was with the email)
Thanks for this, but it looks as though it does not include Training Type and Equipment (I know there can be multiple equipment fields so that might be complex, although I only use one per entry) or sport (I am riding both Velomobile and Cycle). Is it too difficult to add these to the import as it would be too big a job to do manually.
My data spreadsheet has about 2,200 rows. You say not to add too many workouts at once - how many are too many?
Thanks again!
Helen
and then about two hours later he had incorporated four additional fields into the spreadsheet macro thingie for the upload...
In the appendix you will find a version with sports, etc. I would start with 20 and then increased to 100.
Regards
Nils
My response
Thanks for responding again Nils.
I have had a look and thought I had everything right for a sample of 10 rides but unfortunately my version of Excel (for Mac) has stripped out the Macros at some point. I will have another look tomorrow when my brain is functioning better!
Thanks again - it's great to see you are working to help people using your site.
I'm not sure if it works with Excel on Mac OS X. I believe Excel for Mac can not use macros. Maybe you can find a PC with Excel.
I'll borrow a PC to do it in due course, but I was amazed that he was responding so quickly and actually solving my problems all within the space of a day.
The site is great so I very much recommend it. I'll be logging in both places for the time being (for the ticker) but I guess I will probably rely more on VeloHero in the long term as the developer is actually interested in communicating. Cost for the Pro version is 20 Euros per year which is very reasonable.