[Tutorial] Creating a Giveaways Table/Chart

[Tutorial] Creating a Giveaways Table/Chart

tl;dr

See the 2nd attached image to see the script in action.

Introduction

This tutorial will teach you how you can very quickly create charts/tables of giveaways you created. It uses the comment formatting that is used on the forums here. You can paste these tables in threads you create so people will get to see a nice listing with links to the Steam Store and your giveaways and optionally things like giveaway level, end date, etc. It also creates rows ready to be pasted to 'special threads', see below.

If users have RaChart installed they will even see which games they already own and which are on their wishlist.

What you need

To make this work you need a User Script Manager and the SteamGifts Giveaways Table/Chart Creator script. See these posts for more details:

• [Tutorial] Installing User Scripts (Tampermonkey)
• [Userscript] SteamGifts Giveaways Table/Chart Creator

Highly recommended

You won't need these scripts but RaChart is just amazing and if you want to create your giveaways quickly then there's a script for that too.

• [Userscript] RaChart™ Enhancer
• [Userscript] SteamGifts Multiple Giveaways Creator

Step by step

After installing the script you will see that the Giveaways Created page now has a number of new options in the sidebar, below the regular ones (see the 1st attached image). These allow you to customise the tables you can create. When you hover your mouse over any button or field a help text will appear.

The Add Checkboxes button adds a checkbox in front of each giveaway and options to select all or none of them. You can click individual checkboxes to have only those selected added to the tables that will be created. If you don't add any checkboxes then all giveaways on the page will be added to tables.

The Giveaway Title field can be left empty normally, it is explained under More Options below.

You can use the Level field to add the level of the giveaways to an extra column and to the rows for the 'special threads'.

The Extra Columns field can be used to add extra columns, including some special ones, this is explained under More Options below.

Finally, the Don't include ended Giveaways checkbox allows for only those giveaways that are still running to be entered into the tables.

Once you have everything set to your liking, simply press the Create Giveaways Table button. Below the button there will appear a heading called Created Tables and below that will be links to pop-ups with the created tables.

Note that normally the order of the tables will be identical to the order of the created giveaways on the page but if there is no game image on the page it will take longer to get the information and that game will end up at the bottom of the created tables.

The tables that are created are all different, here's what they do:

• SG Table: this is the basic table for pasting to your own threads, it already includes heading and alignment rows. Columns from Extra Columns will be added to this table.
• Excel Table: this uses the exact same settings as the SG Table above but it will have the columns separated by a tab so you can paste it to Excel for further work.
• Giveaways for peace: creates rows with the exact column order to be pasted to this thread.
• Positive thread!: creates rows with the exact column order to be pasted to this thread.
• 💛❤️️ You're Not Alone #3 ❤️️💛: creates rows with the exact column order to be pasted to this thread.

The pop-ups have a Copy Table to Clipboard button that will copy everything to your clipboard when clicked. You are then ready to paste the text to your own thread or one of the 'special threads'.

The 3rd attached image shows a simple table/chart created with this script (and enhanced with RaChart).

More Options

Giveaway Title
This field allows you to specify a name that will be used in the giveaway column for all giveaways. You could, for instance, enter "Click here" into the field and then all links to giveaways would display that text. If you leave this empty then the link to the giveaway will be displayed directly. You can use the special variables as described below.

Extra Columns
You can add extra columns to the SG and Excel tables using this field. Separate all columns with a pipe symbol ( | ) as usual for formatting tables on here. Make sure to start with a pipe symbol in front of the first extra column; |Column 1|Column 2|etc. Do not put a space between the pipe symbol and the column name if you want to copy to Excel.

The text you enter for the columns will be used for both the table header as for every table row; you will likely want to do a bit more with the text or the usefulness is quite limited. There are three special variables you can use here to put data into these extra columns; they are surrounded by %'s and do the following:

• %CN%: This variable will be replaced with your user name, the heading for the column will be "User".
• %ED%: This variable will be replaced with the end date for the giveaway (day month), the heading for the column will be "End Date".
• %LVL%: This variable will be replaced with whatever you entered into the Level field, the heading used for the column be "Level".

View attached image.

View attached image.

View attached image.