Excel Tips for Evergreen Reports

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1 Excel Tips for Evergreen Reports With Excel, you can further pare down and manipulate data from Evergreen reports, or you can simply format the report output to print nicely. Here are some tips, from basic tips to the slightly more advanced, to help you get the most out of Evergreen reports. Please note that depending on your version of Excel, your screen may look different from the images in this guide but the steps will be similar. Excel Tip 1: Format Item and Patron Barcodes When you first download a report from Evergreen and open it in Excel, your barcodes will probably look like this: The quickest way to make barcodes readable is to format them as zip codes, because the zip code format is designed to show all digits even for very long numbers. To do this, right-click the column header, and choose Format Cells : In the dialog box that pops up, select Special from the left-hand menu and then choose Zip code (usually the top option). Click OK and your barcodes will appear in full! You can use this trick for item or patron barcodes (and of course for patron zip codes that display missing the leading 0).

2 Hint: If ### symbols show instead of data in one of your columns, then your column is not wide enough to display the data. To fix this, drag the column wider or simply double-click the right edge of the column header to auto-fit. Excel Tip 2: Hide/Unhide Columns Sometimes a report may have additional columns that you don t need. While you can certainly delete these columns if you know you won t need them, sometimes it is helpful to simply hide columns you don t want to see. That way, if you need them later, they are still part of the report and you can unhide them to access them. To hide a column, right-click the column header and choose Hide.

3 You can also hide multiple columns at once by holding down the Ctrl key while clicking multiple column headers. When you get to the final column you want to hide, right-click it and select Hide as normal. If you want to unhide a column, the easiest way is to select the columns on either side of the hidden one (you can easily see which one was hidden because the letter for that column will be missing). Hold down the Shift key and click the column header before the missing letter and the column header after the missing letter, then right-click and choose Unhide. Hint: When un-hiding a single column it is very important to use Shift rather than Ctrl to select the columns to either side. This selects the hidden middle column. To unhide all hidden columns in your spreadsheet, press Ctrl+A, then click on any column header at the top and choose Unhide.

4 Excel Tip 3: Format Report for Printing There are a few different tools in Excel you can use to help make your report printer-friendly. If there are columns in your report that you know you don t want to print, you can start by hiding or deleting those columns. This is the best option if the columns you want to print are not all next to each other. Option 1: Set Print Area If the columns you want to print are all next to each other with no unwanted columns in between, you can use Set Print Area to select which section to print without hiding or deleting any columns from your spreadsheet. To start, select the columns you want to print, by clicking the first column header then holding down your Shift key and clicking the last column header to include. From the Page Layout menu, choose Print Area > Set Print Area.

5 When you print the spreadsheet, only the columns you included as part of the Print Area will print. You can look at the Print Preview to verify that all columns fit and resize columns by clicking and dragging the edges as needed. Hint: You can also set a Print Area for only part of a list. For example, if you only want to print 50 items at a time, you can select the first 50 rows and whichever columns you want and click Set Print Area. If you want to undo or change your Print Area, just click Clear Print Area from the same menu. Option 2: Page Break Preview If the columns you want to print are not all next to each other, Set Print Area will not work well, because it will only print the first set of columns that are together. Instead, you can hide or delete any unwanted columns and then from the View menu, select the Page Break Preview to see how the sheet will break up onto separate pages. In our example, there are too many columns and we can see that it won t fit on one page width. The next steps will go through options for fixing this.

6 The great thing about Page Break Preview is that you don t need to stay in it! Now that we have looked at it, if you switch back to the Normal view, dotted lines will stay behind to show you where your pages will break. Fine-tuning: Page Layout, Margins, and Column Adjustments To fit a report on one page width, sometimes it will be necessary to hide, delete, or resize some columns. There are also some settings that you can adjust to allow more information to fit per page under the Page Settings menu. One option is to change the page layout from Portrait to Landscape, so that you can fit more columns at the cost of fewer items per page.

7 You can also adjust the margins to fill more of the page. Usually the pre-set Narrow option is a good choice for printing reports. Using a combination of hidden columns, narrow margins, and landscape orientation, this report will now print nicely in one page width, as you can see from Print Preview or Page Break Preview:

8 Excel Tip 4: Sorting By default, your report will be sorted alphabetically based on the column data from left to right, but you can change that easily with the Sort feature of Excel. It should be located under the Data menu: Hint: Make sure to click Sort and not one of the A-Z or Z-A shortcuts. These shortcuts only sort on the first column.

9 The Sort Dialog box comes up, and you can choose your sort options: A: My data has headers (checkbox). Make sure this box is checked, or your column titles will end up sorted in the middle of the data. B: Choose Columns to Sort by. Each sort level has a drop-down menu that lists all of the columns you can sort by. C: Sort Order. This will default to A to Z which usually will work well for dealing with report output. D: Add/Delete Level. You can sort by multiple levels, or delete unwanted sort levels with these buttons. E: Sort Level Order. If you are sorting on multiple levels, use these buttons to move levels up or down in priority. When you have your sort options configured the way you want, click OK. Hint: If you want to sort your report by call number, the best way is actually to sort by the Call Number Sort column, rather than just Call Number. You can sort by this column even if it is hidden, and it will help keep call numbers in the most logical order. Excel Tip 5: Filtering In some cases, you may want to break a report up into sections, or even delete entries from a report that was run with broader parameters than you really need. Excel has a great feature to allow you to filter your results, located under the Data menu.

10 Basic Filters The Filter button is a toggle on/off button. When it is toggled on, arrow icons appear at the top of each column. To filter on a particular column, click the arrow above that column, and the filtering menu appears: The Basic Filters box will show you the different fields that are in the selected column. To include an item from the list in your filtered output, make sure the box next to it is checked. To filter an item out of your output, uncheck it. You can also select or deselect the entire list by toggling Select All. In the above example, only items in Available status will be shown:

11 Notice the blue row numbers, and the fact that some numbers are missing. When you apply a filter in place like this, the filtered out data still exists in your report, but it is hidden. Detailed Filters You can further refine filters to greater detail by using the Text Filters option, above the list of column data in the Filter menu:

12 A column like Call Number will have many possible items in it, and it doesn t make sense to go through and check/uncheck them manually, so instead we will use a text filter. For this example, we will use the Begins With filter and filter only to items that have a call number beginning with YA Hint: Clicking on any of the Text Filters will bring up the same Custom Filters dialog box. The difference will be which text filter is pre-filled in the box, but you can always change it.

13 The text you enter in the custom filter box is case-insensitive. You can use the? symbol to substitute a single character or the * to substitute multiple characters (Example: Y*Graphic will bring up variations such as YA Graphic, Young Adult Graphic, Youth Graphic). You can apply two different text filters at once. For example, we could select Or between the two filters and use the second box to search for call numbers beginning with J, and our filter would show items with either a J or a YA call number. Hint: If you are working with a number (like Total Circs) or a date (like Last Circ Date), there will also be options for less than / greater than in the Custom Filters dialog box. You can also filter a list multiple times. For example, you can filter to Copy Status Available and then perform a Call Number filter and both filters will be honored. Copying a Filtered List If your list is filtered the way you like it and you want to permanently delete the hidden entries, the easiest way is simply to copy your whole filtered list into a new sheet. Press Ctrl + A to select the entire list and press Ctrl + C to copy it. Click the new tab icon at the bottom of the screen to insert a new sheet, and then click in the top-left cell of that new sheet and press Ctrl + V to paste your filtered list. The pasted list will contain only the items that you filtered to. If you need to, you can always go back to the first sheet to access the hidden records. If you are sure that you are done with the larger, unfiltered list, you can delete the entire sheet by right-clicking the sheet tab and selecting Delete. There is no way to undo this, so Excel will ask you to confirm the delete. Clearing Filters To clear any unwanted filters, just click the Clear button in the Filters menu. You can toggle filters off if you are done applying filters just by clicking Filters again.

14 Excel Tip 6: Trim Unwanted Data (Text-to-Columns) Sometimes you may want to keep only part of the data in a column. There is a quick and easy way to do this with Excel! One example of a time where you may want to trim data is with a date. In many reports, the timestamp is included with the date because it s often helpful to have, but sometimes you may want to remove the timestamp. For this example, we will remove the timestamp from the Last Circ Date column. The basic idea behind Text-to-Columns is that it will split your columns at a designated point into two or more columns. This will overwrite any columns that are already in the same place, so for this reason it is very important to insert extra blank columns to the right of the column you are splitting. If you look at the Last Circ Date column in this report, you can see that there is a space between the date and the timestamp: We will use the space as the designated character to split the column on. However, notice that the column header, Last Circulation Date has two spaces in it, so while the rest of the column will split nicely into two, the header as it is now will end up in three separate columns. You can either insert an extra blank column to accommodate this, or you can just delete one of the spaces and insert only one extra column. To insert a new column, just right-click the column header to the right of the column you are splitting and choose Insert.

15 Once you have your blank column inserted, click the column header of the column you want to split to select all the data in that column. Then, under the Data menu, choose Text-to-Columns. The text-to-columns wizard comes up. On the first screen, make sure that Delimited is selected and then click Next.

16 On the next screen, make sure that Space is checked and all other options are unchecked. Note that you can see a preview of how the columns will split before you finalize it. You can simply click Finish in Step 2 or you can click Next and then Finish. Excel will ask you if you want to replace existing columns with your split data. This is why we inserted a blank column at the beginning. We will just be overwriting this blank column so click OK. The column will be split and you can simply right-click the column header for the data you don t want and choose Delete. You ll be left with just the date and Excel will automatically put it in a nice format. You can fix the column title as well if needed.

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