Spreadsheet Magic - The Importance of Exportance

OK, I just made that up - “Exportance” isn’t a real word.  But exporting is a real concept, and a very important one at that.  Last week on the Tuesday Technique Tips I demonstrated how to import search results from Ancestry.com into an Excel spreadsheet.  This week, I’d like to show how to export a batch of results from FamilySearch.org into a spreadsheet.  Once that data is in a spreadsheet format you can manipulate and sort and annotate it to your heart’s content.  Here’s how…

My example below shows a search for surname RODDY with a birthplace of Ohio, and a year range of 1850-1900. I have limited the search to two specific collections – “Ohio Births and Christenings, 1821-1962” and “Ohio, County Births, 1841-2003.” 
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Here is a screenshot of the first few results.  FamilySearch allows me to set the number of results to show, either 20, 50 or 75.  I always set it at 75 – after all, more results in the bucket means fewer trips back to the well to gather additional data.

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​Now I have some results which I could begin to type into a spreadsheet - a lot of results, and that means a lot of typing.  But watch what happens if I click on the “Sign In” button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.  

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​Once I am signed in with my FamilySearch account, the “Export Results 1-75” button magically appears.  When I click on that, my results are automatically exported to an Excel spreadsheet that looks pretty much like this:

Note that ​I have widened a few of the columns, and eliminated ones from the export which contained no data.  Now I can sort or filter or otherwise manipulate the data to help me in my research on the Roddy family.  If I have more than 75 results in my search, at the bottom of the page I can get to the second or later page of results, and import the second batch of 75 into a spreadsheet.  It will create a new spreadsheet, but I just copy and paste the results to the bottom of my original spreadsheet.  Look at all that data, and hardly any typing involved! 

I hope this technique helps you speed up your research with spreadsheets.