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.” 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. 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. 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.
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.
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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.
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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".
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AuthorMary 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. Archives
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