Moving your birding records from a spreadsheet to an app

Spreadsheets are where many birders start — and quickly outgrow. If your life list lives in a tangle of columns, here’s how to move it into something that does the hard work for you.

Signs you’ve outgrown your spreadsheet

• You dread updating it after a trip.
• Your totals never quite add up.
• You can’t see your numbers by location or country without fiddly formulas.
• It only lives on one computer.

What to keep

The good news is your spreadsheet already holds the valuable part: your history. Species, dates and locations are all you really need to bring across. Everything else — totals, charts, milestones — an app can generate for you.

Tidy as you go (or let us do it)

Before importing, it helps to standardise species names and location spellings so your records merge cleanly. If that sounds like a chore, it doesn’t have to be yours: the Trip Tick team will happily take your spreadsheet, however messy, and de-duplicate, standardise and import it for you at no extra cost.

Life after the spreadsheet

Once your records are in, your life, year and month totals update automatically, your locations build their own tallies, and twenty-one reports turn years of rows into insight. The day you stop maintaining formulas is a good day.