Using Spreadsheets for parish marriages

[LadyJayne]

Hello listers, hope everyone is enjoying boxing day. Lovely to have a bit of spare time off work so it's  a great opportunity for me to think about how to go about using spreadsheets for parish marriages and the best way to input them. I've been using excel for general birth marriages and death indexes but trying to type in the marriage information is proving a bit difficult as keeping the bride and groom together makes for a very long vertical row which on a small screen is not ideal and I was just looking for other users ideas on this.

[Berlin-Bob]

Hi LadyJane,

not a direct answer, but you may find some useful tips and hints here:

RootsChat Topics: Organising and Presenting your Family History
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=158638.0

in particular, ideas on using spreadsheets for collecting information.
Topic: Spreadsheets help track Surnames
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,31779.15.html
and also
Topic: Not realy a tec problem,but about excel
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,199033.0.html

Good luck,
Bob

[LadyJayne]

Thanks Bob,

I did find the topic about Excel very useful, esp the on how to word-wrap. The problem I now have is that for some reason I'm having problems with the way it handles dates. I have the day and month in one column and no matter how much I try and format this it's defaulting to 01/06/2017! when it should just be 01 Jun. I have a separate column for the year. 

[Hammerman]

Highlight the column you want for day-month in the top line of your sheet i.e. 'C'

Right click and go 'Format cells' then the 'number' tag

Choose 'Custom' then scroll down till you see 'dd-mmm' and pick it.

Once you have all the months enterered you only have to type say '2 [space] F' to get 02-Feb in the column.

If you 'freeze' the top line (the column descriptions you have entered) and then select all the columns and 'custom sort' you can put everything in order by the columns you want ie. Sort by Year, then date then parish etc. Don't forget though when sorting the whole sheet you have selected all columns and tick the 'My data has headers' box (the frozen description line). If you forget a column all the lines will fail to line up and you work will be wasted. Perhaps get in the habit of saving a copy every so often that you can go back to as it is easily done!

[Hammerman]

Also if you already have a column with dates in (and years) make another column along side it and copy the whole column into it. You can then easily work down the list entering day and month

[Hammerman]

Here's an image of my marriage tab. With so many columns you can sort by any order you like.

[LadyJayne]

Highlight the column you want for day-month in the top line of your sheet i.e. 'C'

Right click and go 'Format cells' then the 'number' tag

Choose 'Custom' then scroll down till you see 'dd-mmm' and pick it.

Once you have all the months enterered you only have to type say '2 [space] F' to get 02-Feb in the column.

Hi Hammerman, This didn't work for me, when I type in 02 Feb in the column then tab out of it I get 02/02/2017

[Hammerman]

Does it work if you only format one cell?

[LadyJayne]

No, just tried it and no joy, exactly the same. I'm using Microsoft office 2013