After creating a better way to analyse the loans I make through Kiva, which led me to seriously start bagging countries to fill up my map of loans, I was looking for a way to highlight new countries so I could pounce on loans before they got fully funded.

I created my first Greasemonkey Script (Kiva Country Highlighter) to do just that – it looks at a list of countries I am interested in and will highlight them in the list of loans on the Kiva website. It has allowed me to bag a couple of rare countries so far, though there are still a few more I am keeping a lookout for…

So with the development made by Kiva it is now possible to export an Excel Spreadsheet with all you loans – a great step forward but it did leave a little to be desired, and the format made it hard to analyse…

I have created a spreadsheet (in Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc formats) which will analyse the data further, splitting fields to allow better sorting, and fields that contain numeric information are now formatted as proper currency or date fields.

Basically you just copy a fresh download of your Kiva Export into a ‘My loans’ tab in the spreadsheet – it does all the necessary using functions, formulas and calculations. No macros are used for those worried about security risks.

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