Exporting an AviSys Census Spreadsheet to Excel

While these instructions are written for Excel 97, they can be applied to other versions of Excel. Menu Items and command locations may be different, but you'll be able to figure it out. The concepts can be applied to any commercial database software.

Very often, you need to print AviSys Census Spreadsheet output in forms and formats different from what AviSys provides. The best way to do this is to export the data to a commercial spreadsheet program where you can get complete control of the data and its print formatting. Print this page to use as you work.

In AviSys, produce the Census Spreadsheet you wish to export. The AviSys User's Guide, Chapter 5, Reports, will provide all the information you need. Print Preview it to be sure you are getting the data you need.

With the Report Criteria dialog set up as you need it, click Run, and then at the Print Options dialog click Text File. At the dialog, name the file, using a ".TXT" extension. (Remember the name and folder.) That produces a comma-delimited interchange export file of the spreadsheet data.

• Start Microsoft Excel. You are placed in a blank spreadsheet.
• Set the font to Arial 10, unless you have other requirements right now.
• Select File and Open.
• Drop down the Files of type: edit and select Text files.
• Drop down the Look in: edit and select the folder where you placed the AviSys output.
• Select your AviSys output file.
• At the Text Import Wizard Step 1 dialog, check Delimited.
• Set Start input at: to row 3.
• Click Next.
• At the Step 2 dialog, under Delimiters: uncheck all but Comma.
• At Text qualifier: select ".
• Click Next.
• At the Step 3 dialog, keep all columns at General.
• Click Finish.
• Your data is now placed in the spreadsheet.
• Optional: remove the Species header, as that's intuitively obvious.
• Optional: highlight the cells with family names and click the Bold and/or Italics buttons on the tool bar.
• Optional: after the last bird in the spreadsheet, highlight the Totals cell. Click the Insert menu item, and select Rows to add an additional space.
• Consult your Excel documentation, or Help, to create proper headers, lock the headers, insert calculations, etc.
• Click File and select Page Setup.
• At the Page tab, you can select Adjust to: to select a size reduction percentage to get more data on a page and have fewer pages.
• Also, you can select Fit to width: to cause your data to fill one entire page width.
• Click the Margins tab to adjust the margins to meet your requirements.
• Click the Sheet tab to cause grid lines to be printed, row column headers to be printed, and to do a Print or Print Preview.
• You can block the entire spreadsheet and apply fonts and font attributes as you require.
• When you save the spreadsheet, be sure to reset the File / Save dialog to where you keep your spreadsheets -- it's probably still pointing to where your AviSys data is.

If you find errors in these procedures, or have suggestions for improvements, please let us know at <support@avisys.net>