eBird Express: New Excel tool to simplify data upload

eBird Express quickly and easily loads to your computer and sets up excel templates from which you can create bulk uploadable lists.

Before loading eBird Express, be sure to read the instructions and watch the tutorial videos which provide much useful information on the wide range of functionality available with eBird Express.

Once you understand how it works, you can download eBird Express and start using it! You'll soon realize that it has a handful of tricks that are pretty nifty, including:

•    Quickly opens a blank checklist with all your species--you just fill in the effort data and the numbers.
•    When you’re done, it spits out a formatted .CSV file onto your desktop that’s ready for uploading into eBird.
•    It can also (at the same time!) save an excel file into an archive folder of your choice.
•    It adds GPS coordinates to your location names, ensuring each location is unique in eBird.
•    You can enter an end time and have the duration automatically calculated.
•    Data validation warns you if problems are found. This is faster than uploading your checklists first only to find out there’s a problem and then having to figure out how to fix it.

eBird Express is completely free and works with Excel 2002 through 2007 on Microsoft Windows. You can learn more about it (including a 45 second animated demonstration), download it, and view animated instructions on how to install it, all at Jay’s site. The application does not work with a mac unless you are running Parallels or another application that allows you to run Excel through Windows.

Be sure to send feedback to Jay Packer if you have any trouble getting it to work (or if you just want to tell him how much you like it.)

Excel templates

eBird Express works by creating excel templates with embedded code that performs the error checking and other functionality. But what is an excel template? Templates are a way to create a new file with information and formatting already filled in. After creating a new file from a template, you save this file as a document for later use.

So for our purposes, templates will hold a blank checklist. You’ll create a new file from a template to get a blank checklist ready to be filled out. You might make new templates for every state or county that you regularly bird. The documents created from these templates will hold your checklists. You’ll fill in all your information about the birds you saw, and when finished, you’ll run eBird Express to process your data for uploading into eBird.

The instructions at the eBird Express website go into more depth on Excel Templates, how to set them up, and how to run and install eBird Express.

How do I get a list of species from my area?

eBird Express comes preloaded with a list of all ABA species. It works even better if you create a template with a standard list of expected species for whatever area you are birding. But where do you get such a list? Well, from eBird of course! One quick and easy way to build a template species list for your area is to download the bar chart. Did you know that any bar chart you generate can be downloaded to a spreadsheet with a single click? Simply look for the "Download Historgram Data" at the bottom right portion of any eBird bar chart. By clicking this link you download the species list from the bar chart with weekly frequency values. If you are a wiz at excel, you can use the frequency values to pare the list down to the more frequent species in your area (try summing the frequencies and then sorting by that value). But regardless, it provides a quick way to generate a species list for your area with species names that correspond perfectly to eBird!

Using eBird Express in the field

Many of us travel with laptops these days, and if your weekend birding involves driving from one key birding location to another, you may want to consider changing up your laptop battery and bringing it along. When the eBird team goers birding together, we often keep a laptop fired up with eBird Express so that we can fill out our bird lists in the field as we go. We discuss the counts of each species in between the stops and then when we get back to the office, the eBird lists are ready to be uploaded. Those that get carsick when reading or typing in a moving car may want to avoid this method though!

We hope you enjoy eBird Express and if you do use it and like it please do send Jay Packer a thank you note via his feedback page. Jay developed this new tool totally on his own simply as a way to support eBird and help our larger goal of making data entry faster and easier so that the international community of birders can better describe patterns of bird distribution and occurrence using our personal sightings. If you have a similar idea that you think will help eBird, please get in touch at ebird@cornell.edu.

If you use eBird Express, you should probably sign up for the RSS feed for updates from the URL below.

http://www.ocellated.com/tag/ebird-express-updates/feed/

A final word of caution!

Uploading your records into eBird from Excel is quick, but you need to be careful to make sure that you enter the number for the correct species. It's easy to be "off" a row, so instead of reporting 56 Bonaparte's Gulls, you report 56 Little Gulls! For this reason do a little checking to make sure you are entering the correct species before you upload. Once you have uploaded your checklist, take a look at some of your lists in My eBird (to make sure nothing unexpected shows up.