• New Site Q & A

1. Getting Immediate Help
   
   
2. Required Guidelines and Policies
     Cafe Guidelines
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     Required Files
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3. Moderating Freecycle
     Organisational Chart
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4. The "Files"
   
   
5. Notices
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6. Responses
   
   
7. Pass The Torch
   
   
8. Volunteering
   
   
9. Translations
   
   
10. UK Moderators Manual
    
    

BACKING UP Your Member List

Backing up your member list on a regular basis is a recommended practice to get into. Occasionally, Yahoo glitches. Maintaining your membership list off-line will save you the hassle of reconstructing the group at a later date without the benefit of a list. There are no set guidelines on when to backup your list, but it's easy enough to do, so backup as often as you like... just make sure it gets done. Items in BOLD are links to click or mouse click commands to navigate through the various instructions required to make changes.

To download your member list, go to the main front page. Click on Members. Click Download. That will open a large list of member mails. Right mouse click > Copy the entire list and right mouse click > Paste it into any program you use such as Excel, Word, Notepad or something similar. Save your member list with a file name that is recognizable so you can retrieve it at a later date if necessary. Since any mod in the group can do this, it wouldn't hurt to have more than one mod doing backups at any given time.

EXPORTING Your Member List Into Excel

This procedure allows you to find out who has what settings on your group and who has what email preferences. This procedure should be accomplished by any and all owners/mods on the group periodically (frequently) to ensure your group has a backup copy of the list available in case of a Yahoo 'coffee break'. Items in BOLD are links to click or mouse click commands to navigate through the various instructions required to make changes.

From the main page click Members > choose Export. Copy the entire document using right mouse click > Select All > right mouse click > Copy or hold down the CTRL+A (or, from the top of your browser page select Edit > Select All), then CTRL+C (or, from the top of your browser page select Edit > Copy).

Open Microsoft Excel and click your mouse into the first cell. Paste the copied data into the first cell of the Excel spreadsheet using right click mouse > Paste or hold down the CTRL+V (or Edit > Paste). In Excel, located on the top of the page, select Data > Text to Columns and click Next. Set Delimiters to commas. Click Next > Finish.

To clean up your spreadsheet, delete the cells with commas and semicolons by highlighting the headers of each column using the left click mouse. To remove the highlighted columns, right click mouse > Delete .

To sort your data, choose a column to sort on by using left click mouse. Select Data > Sort > Expand the current selection. Click Sort > OK which will leave the values set at the default.

Don't forget to click File >Save or File > Save As to maintain a current copy of your backup! Save it to something that correlates with the day, month and year of the backup for easy retrieval.

EXPORTING Your Member List Into Word

From the main page click Members > choose Export. This shows you a new page full of info (and commas and quote marks!!!) From the top menus on your browser page, select File > Save As. Pay attention to the file name and where you save it, then click OK. This gives you a file to work with.

Open Microsoft Word and from the top menus select File > Open and open the "members" file you just saved. At this point, you might want to change the "Courier" font to something more readable. Hold down the CTRL+A to highlight everything, then select Format > Font to Arial or whatever is more appealing to you. Click OK to change)

Next, you'll want to convert everything to a table. Hold down CTRL+A (or from the top menu select Edit > Select All). From the same top menus, select Table > Convert > Text to Table. In the dialog box that appears, change number of columns to *10* and set "Separate text at" to Commas.'

Get rid of those pesky single quotes everywhere. From the top menus select Edit > Replace. Under "Find What" type ' <-- that's just one single quote. Leave the Replace With area blank. Click on Replace All. You'll get a message box saying it's replaced ### occurrences.

Delete the useless empty columns. Click in any cell in a column you want to delete. Then from the top menus select Table > Delete > Column. To delete another column, click anywhere in that column, then press the F4 button (that repeats the previous action, whatever that was. In this case, it was delete column.)

To resize a column, rest your mouse on the right edge of that column. Your pointer should change to a double-sided arrow. Then, just click and drag.

To sort a column, from the top menus, select Table > Sort. In the dialog box, pick the column you want to sort by and choose either in ascending or descending order, and click OK.

Don't forget to save your file!

(Exporting your member list into Word Instructions are courtesy of Karin, Rochester, Minnesota Freecycle™ Moderator - adapted/edited accordingly for use)