MARY KIRCHER RODDY
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Searching for Stories

Spreadsheet Magic - The Importance of Exportance

5/17/2016

4 Comments

 
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:
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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.
4 Comments
John Sparrow
5/17/2016 06:32:09 pm

You learn things all the time. I found the blog listing for the Ancestry on Jana's weekly listings. This comment relates to that. I was not able to find how to comment on an previous blog on that blog.
I use a different way to get Ancestry results into a spreadsheet.
I copy and past each of the results into a word document, save that both as a Word doc, but more importantly, as a text document, and then open that text doc in the spreadsheet. Haven't done it for while, it may be importing it, instead of directly opening it.
Thanks for the blog

Reply
Frederick C Buss Jr
5/21/2016 07:39:50 pm

Have Office 36 and would like to learn how to get spread sheet from any of Ancestry or Legacy FT. Family Search trees to Excell.

Reply
John Sparrow
5/23/2016 12:09:01 am

Hi Frederick. I left a word out of my comment . "I copy and paste each "page" of the results etc".
Here is a link to Mary's blog regarding the transfer from Ancestry to a Spreadsheet - http://www.mkrgenealogy.com/searching-for-stories-blog/spreadsheet-magic-importing-data-from-ancestrycom

Reply
Zdenka link
3/29/2017 12:53:06 am

Thank you for sharing and hopefully helping others.

Reply

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    Mary Kircher Roddy is a genealogist, writer and lecturer, always looking for the story.  Her blog is a combination of the stories she has found and the tools she used to find them.

    Read more of Mary's writings at "Adventures of A Broad Abroad" and at Letters from Limerick

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