How to create a Giveaways Table/Chart in a few clicks

This has been superceded by [Tutorial] Creating a Giveaways Table/Chart.

What

Trains on Steamgifts are great and I love riding them. They do involve a lot of clicking though, and a lot of going past games you already own.

Can we do better? Yes, we can! Below I explain (with screenshots) how you, too, can create a nicely laid out table (which optionally highlights games already owned for people) that's easy to use for everyone, with just a few clicks (once you have it all set up, the first time will obviously take longer). See the first screenshot of what one looks like.

BTW, I'm not saying trains are bad, they are fun to ride and there are definitely cases where they are the better option.

How

This looks like a lot of text (also cause I enumerate some edge cases) but trust me, it's all pretty straightforward and worth it, in my opinion, if you create a lot of giveaways.

First things first, you will need a few addons/scripts for your browser (if you don't have them already). You will need an addon called Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey to run the userscripts we need, you can find more information about those on the RaChart page.

Then you will need a few userscripts:

Steamgifts GA creator

Note that this is not the Table script I created, that comes later in this post. We use Steamgifts GA creator to really speed up the creation of our giveaways, click here to install it. This script was created by Pablo Bianciotto (and now updated by me) and it works great. This is optional if you just want the tables but it's a huge time saver when creating giveaways.

What it does, is that it lets us create our giveaways in bulk. It adds a 0th option to the Create a New Giveaway page, see second screenshot. What you can do now is post a list of key + game combinations in that first box and then set all the other giveaway details (end time, invite only, etc.) as normal. When done you just click the Review Giveaway button at the bottom and it will open new tabs, one for each key + game combination.

A few things to keep in mind:

Obviously this script works quickest when you already have a list of keys + games (in Excel for instance) but even if you do not, it will still save you a lot of time as you will only have to set all details once instead of for every giveaway; just copy the key and game name from your bundle site (or whatever). Each key + game should be on a line of its own, separated by a space.

The script enters the game name and only creates a new tab if there is an exact match for it, if not, then once it's done it will tell you exactly which games it could not find a match for so you can change the name and try again (type part of the name in the Select a Game box to see what the correct name should be and copy/paste it). Sometimes the name on the bundle site is not exactly the same as on Steam (and thus Steamgifts), not much you can do about this but manually change the name.

Your browser's popup blocker might stop the tabs from being created so be sure to whitelist Steamgifts. My Firefox install still blocks if twenty tabs get created even though I whitelisted the site, so I create the giveways in batches of 19, just to be sure.

Keep in mind that certain games are not allowed to be given away on Steamgifts. Chances are that if you have a long list of games and keys, some of those games will be in there. This might be a reason why no match will be found. There is a helpful thread to check: Can we have a list of games that cannot be created as giveaway? (Unofficial List inside). Personally, I copy the list on that page to my Excel file once in a while and do a check for banned games right in Excel so it won't clutter up the giveaway creation.

Table/Chart Giveaways Creator

This is a script I wrote to quickly create the actually table/chart; more info and the script link are here. This script adds two input boxes and a green button called "Create Giveaway Tables" to the sidebar of the Giveaways - Created page (see third screenshot). When clicking said button it will create two text areas at the top of the page with the tables; one for pasting to a Steamgifts post (using the | separator) and a tab separated one for pasting to Excel (sometimes I want to add more to a table and put it in Excel first and then create a table there. You can use the two input boxes on the left to add a default name for giveaways and extra colums, hover over the boxes to get a help text.

We're almost there now. All you need to do is copy the text from the SG Table box (click it, it will expanded to fit the contents, press Ctrl + A to select all text and then Ctrl + C to copy. Now you can paste the table in any post on Steamgifts. One thing; the table will be for all 50 giveaways on the page so you will probably want to remove a number of rows from the bottom of the table after pasting (they will be in the exact same order as on the page except for those giveaways that don't have a game image in front of them; those will end up at the bottom.)

In the SG Table box it will also add table headers for you, by default these are called Steam and Giveaway plus any extra columns you added. These are all left aligned using ":-|:", see the Comment Formatting FAQ for more information.

If you did all that and publish your post you should get something similar to the first screenshot. But for the optional highlighting we need another userscript:

RaChart

I've been a fan of RaCharts ever since Sighery created the script; it's such a quick way to see what games in a list/chart/table you own and which you don't. The RaChart page shows you how to install it and how to add your API key and Steam ID64. This might look complicated but it's really not and once you have it set up you'll wonder how you could have lived without it.

That's it!

Once you have that all done, you're ready and from now on will be able to create a 50 (or any other number) giveaways table in a few minutes. See here for an example of one I created.

So go forth and create. :)

If you have any questions, post them below.

Excel extra
If you use Excel or another spreadsheet program you can copy from the second box and paste it to the spreadsheet. If you want to turn the first two columns back into Markdown for the SG forum you can use the following formula:

="**["&A1&"]("&B1&")** | "

This assumes that the info is in the first two columns. The | at the end is to mark the end of the column in Markdown.

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