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Coming from Excel
How your spreadsheets map onto BioManager, and what to do with each one.
If your lab runs on spreadsheets, you already know most of BioManager. The sheet is still there — click a cell and type — but each thing Excel makes you do by hand, BioManager does for you.
What you know, and what it becomes
| In Excel | In BioManager |
|---|---|
| A workbook with a tab per thing | Your lab, with a database per thing in the sidebar: Mouse, Fish, Plasmids, Orders… |
| A row | A record with a number that is never reused, so "mouse 1042" means one mouse forever. |
| Typing, then Save, then "who has the file open?" | Type in the cell; it saves as you type. Everyone edits the same records at once, and nobody's work overwrites anyone else's. |
| AutoFilter | The search box and the chips above every sheet: All, Alive, Mine, one per status. Your last choice is remembered, and it is in the page's address, so a bookmark or a link you send opens the sheet the same way. |
| Freeze panes, hide columns, column widths | The ID stays pinned as you scroll; Columns hides and shows; drag a column's edge to resize. Remembered per sheet. |
| Data validation drop-downs | Choices for a column (statuses, categories, purposes), set in Configure or Dropdowns. Renaming one renames it everywhere. |
| Autocomplete from the column | Suggestions from everything the lab typed before. In inventories, picking an earlier item fills in its vendor, catalogue number and price. |
| Fill down, copy a row | In the mice's Add many preview, click a cell and Fill down (or Ctrl/⌘ + D) copies it to the rows below. Duplicate copies any record. |
| Paste a column | Copy a column of readings (a Nanodrop export, say) or a block of cells, click the first cell in the sheet and paste: the values go down the rows as shown, and across if you copied several columns, each saved as if typed. A number steps over a choice column it isn't one of (the unit between concentration and A260/280), and a note says which rows it went into, first to last, so a list in another order shows at once. |
| Formulas for age, wean and flip dates | Worked out for you: ages, P21 weaning, genotyping dates, flip schedules that follow the incubator's temperature. |
| Conditional formatting | Status pills, a dot for what is alive or in use (coloured by age for animals), expired stock in red — and the Home page gathering everything that needs you today. |
| VLOOKUP between sheets | Real links: a mouse is in a cage on a rack; a sample came from that mouse; an order became that reagent. Click through. |
| Version history, "who changed this?" | The Audit log records every edit, who made it and what it was before; Batch history undoes any bulk change. |
| Mail-merge for cage labels | Cage cards sized for card stock, each with a QR code that opens the cage on a phone. |
| Your old workbook | Import from Excel on every database reads it as it is, whatever its columns are called. |
| Save As CSV | Export on every sheet (CSV; for mice also Excel and PDF). Your data is never locked in. |
Once BioManager is installed and the lab is set up, bring your sheets in: about half an hour.
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