Is there an easier way to look at App Store purchase history?

[illjazz]

I'm building a spreadsheet containing all App Store purchases I've ever made. The goal is for it to include as much information as possible. Why? Because I can, and because this could make for some pretty interesting raw data for statistical analysis of my personal App Store purchasing tendencies.

Now, the only way I've found to browse the purchase history is via iTunes, as is shown in the attached screenshot. You can get to that by clicking "Purchase History" at the bottom right of any receipt email you get from do_not_reply@itunes.com.

Does anyone know if this can also be browsed on the web? There are huge downsides of the way this information is displayed inside iTunes:

1. None of the text is selectable
2. The column headers are static which means that neither sorting order nor column width can be changed
3. This being iTunes, browsing this information in general is simply slow
4. The damn thing is completely unnecessarily paginated when the entire purchase history could be listed as one long list

Put all that together and you have a highly user-unfriendly way of browsing App Store purchase history information.

Another option would be to copy the info out of every email receipt I ever received from the App Store. As you can imagine, that would be insanely tedious.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[bevhoward]

The need to do this comes up frequently in my life... the following is not that simple, but, it works and has become an invaluable tool for me.

If you have this need regularly, some of the following can be automated.

Open the screen

Do a screen capture on that screen (on a PC press <Alt-prtScr>)

Paste that into any image editor (such as irfanview)

Crop so that just the text remains

Reduce the color depth to "2"

Save as a gif or tiff file

Run an OCR on that image (I use FineReader which is always 100% accurate on these images)

Hope that this information is of value.
Beverly Howard

 

[wordoflife]

I agree, Apple needs a way to view purchased apps. They have it on the iPad and Mac App Store.

 

[bevhoward]

was curious so, I ran my suggestions on the store purchase history and I will withdraw my suggestion to reduce the color depth to 2

Apple uses a grayscale font color for the info which gets corrupted when reducing the color depth... 16 seems ok as well as converting to grayscale.

Beverly Howard

 

[bevhoward]

>> just do it manually. <<

hmmm... would surmise that the writer of that suggestion has never known the heartbreak of dislexia ;-)

Or, perhaps the suggestion of an apple exec.

Beverly Howard