Exporting PowerSchool data to Excel and manipulating that data

Go to your PowerSchool login page and login. If you do not remember/know your login, contact your building PowerSchool person for that information.

Once logged in you need to make a selection of students to work with. For this scenario we will use the middle school students with last names starting with the letter A. There are two ways to do this from the main PowerSchool screen. First you can do a search of students using the search students box

In the search box you would enter an A and all active students with last names starting with A would be listed. If you wanted both active and inactive students you would use a /A. It is not case sensitive.

The other way would be to just select the letter A from the Browse Students below the search box. Remember this way only searches active students.

Once you have your selection made you then go to the drop down box below the listing and select Quick Export.

In the Quick Export screen you need to enter the fields that you want to export. To view all the fields available you can select the hyperlink fields at the bottom of the window and a listing of all the fields will come up. You need to enter the field names as they show up in the listing.

In this case we want the students’ last name, first name, grade level and gender. The corresponding fields for these are last_name, first_name, grade_level, and gender. Type each of these on a line.

Select the submit button and you will get a choice to either open or save the file. We want to open the file with Excel so you would choose the radio button for Open with and then from the list choose Excel or browse to the Excel program startup file on your computer.

If Excel doesn’t come up in the initial listing of programs you need to browse to the excel.exe file. Select the browse button and browse to c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office12 (if you are using a version other than 2007 the number will be different) and in that folder you will find the excel.exe file. Click on it and then it will show up as the program you want to export to

If you are going to be doing much exporting you would also want to check the box that asks to do this from now on. Choose ok and Excel should open with your selections listed.

If you have problems with this you can go back to PowerSchool and instead of opening the file you can save it to your computer and open Excel and then open the file from within Excel.

Within Excel you can sort the data. The data will be sorted alphabetically by last name and we need to sort the information in another way. The data needs to be selected so we highlight the listing by clicking on the top left corner and dragging across to the bottom right of the list.

Now we can sort the list, to do this find the Sort and Filter icon on the menu bar and click on it once. We want to do a custom sort so select that from the list.

The sort window should appear and we want to sort the list by grade level and gender. The one listing that is there will need to be changed to the grade level field so select it from the first drop down box.

Then add another level by selecting the add level button in the top left and then choose gender from the drop down list. Click on ok and you list should be sorted by grade level and gender.

You should now have a sorted list of students by grade level and gender.

From here we want to find out how many males and females there are and how many are in each grade level. Using a function enables Excel to do this work for us. Create the labels for this data and select the cell where you want to show the results. Then select the function link on the taskbar

In the insert function box enter countif in the search box. This is the function we want to use. Once it is highlighted select ok

The function argument window appears and you then select the range of cells that show gender. Then enter F in the criteria row and select ok. The result should give a total for females.

Follow the same procedure for males and each grade level

You would follow the same procedures for any other data that you might have in Excel using different functions or data.