How to Create Custom Simmental Data Spreadsheets

Creating a Sale Catalog Data Ready Spreadsheet
www.herdbook.org

If you’ve ever needed to gather custom data for a sale project or even your own herd management, you know it can be a challenge to navigate through the online data platform to gather all of the information you need. Below are instructions of how to pull your own custom data from the American Simmental Association website. Please note the ASA will allow you to pull data on any ASA registration number, however certain information on cattle that are not your own may not be publicly available, such as actual birthweight information. If you are in need of multiple breeders’ cattle information you’ll need each individuals log-in.

Creating a Custom Report
1.     Create an Excel file with the registration and lot numbers of all cattle in the sale.
2.     Log-in to your ASA account via herdbook.org
3.     Under “Herd Mgmt” tab select “Create Report”
4.     Name your report name, located at the top of the “Custom Report Creation” page
5.     Create your data sheet with the information you’d like to pull into your spreadsheet. You can select the information using the “All Available Headers” tab, which is useful especially for pulling data not publicly shown on Herdbook. You can also select the “Visual Data Selector” tab and click to select the data you’d like in your spreadsheet.
6.     Under the “Selected Headers” box please note you have the ability to order your spreadsheet data, remove data you may have accidentally selected or rename the headings.
a.     You can insert a blank column and create your own custom heading under the “All Available Headers” tab > Misc > EmptyHeader
7.     Once you’ve selected the information needed and organized the order of information as desired select “Save Report” in the left hand corner.
8.     After the report is saved your window should go to the “Reports” page, titled “My Herd.”
9.     The report you created should show the title in the right side box, under “Custom Reports”
10.  Should you need to make changes to your report you need to select the report name and then select “Edit Report” which will return you back to the “Custom Report Creation” page. You should note that if you update the report name it will not create a new report, it will just update the report name shown back on the Reports/”My Herd” page. 

Creating Your Excel Spreadsheet
1.     On the Reports page (“Herd Mgmt” tab > Reports), named “My Herd,” select the “Quick Group” tab located at the top of the left side box.
2.     Now copy and paste the registration numbers from your original spreadsheet into the “Quick Group” box. Each registration number should be on it’s own line.
3.     Once your registration numbers are copied, select the Custom Report you’d like to use, located in the right side box.
4.     If desired, you can select various Sort Options, located in the left corner of the window to sort your spreadsheet.
5.     Select “Generate Report” and a new window should appear (this may take a few moments to populate).
6.     Once your Excel page is generated, you can select the file type you’d like to download in the top left corner, I would recommend a MS Excel (.xls) file. Then select “Download.”
7.     After selecting “Download” an Excel file should download to your computer.

 Formatting Your Final Excel File
1.     Now that you’ve created an Excel file with all of your needed data from the American Simmental Association, open the file and sort the file by registration number.
2.     Then sort your initial Excel file with both the registration number and lot numbers into registration number order as well.
3.     Check to make sure both of your Excel files are in the same registration number order. Then copy and paste over the lot number column into your spreadsheet you created through the American Simmental Association.
4.     Now you can sort your spreadsheet again in lot number order.
5.     With your file almost ready to send over for catalog set-up there are a few other pieces of information that you can include to help streamline the process and help eliminate error, which was briefly noted in the “Create Report” section. Add columns for additional information not located on the ASA website, footnotes (or if your footnotes are in bullet form, just label columns as bullet 1, bullet 2, etc. Any cattle that don’t have information for bullet 2 or 3, or no footnotes just leave blank). You can also create a column for information such as breeding information, consignor/owner, etc.
6.     Once all of your lot box data and information is contained into one Excel file, in lot order, it’s ready to submit.