Showing posts with label Bird Checklist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bird Checklist. Show all posts

Saturday, August 6, 2011

How to Create a Bird Checklist: Part 1 - Assigning Seasons based on Survey Dates (Using Embedded IF Statements)

THE NEED:

I once had 1,800 lines of bird survey data that I wanted to run a report on for a poster I was to present at the New Mexico Ornithological Society annual meeting.  I wanted to show a sort of checklist of birds by season, with data from certain months assigned to each season as follows:

  • December though February would be Winter,
  • March through May would be Spring,
  • June through August would be Summer, and
  • September through November would be Fall.

I certainly wasn't going to go through all 1,800 lines of data and enter which date belonged to which season, so I wrote a formula that I could copy and paste into all the rows of data that identified the season for me.  The "checklist" wound up looking like this:


Read on to see how to use embded "IF" statements in Excel to accomplish this.