So you’ve broken your wide array of interests into smaller specific topics, and made a bill sheet for each one. Keeping your searches narrow helps keep your dashboard and alerts nice and organized, and therefore useful and efficient. You can also set your alert levels differently for different topics, and share alerts with different people by topic, so keeping searches narrow gives you fine control over your communications.
However, sometimes you want to roll your topics back up, and see several, or even all, of your bills together on one sheet. That is where the Combine feature comes in.
To combine multiple bill sheets, click Bill Sheets in the main navigation menu to the left, then View All. Click the Combine button on the right, next to the + New Sheet button.
You can then check the box next to all the bill sheets you wish to combine. You can also choose a template for the combined bill sheet, which allows you to decide what information you would like to see. You can additionally choose to retrieve all bills (including any bills that are on more than one bill sheet) or just distinct bills (which will remove duplicates).
If you have created custom columns for your bill sheets which contain information you wish to see in the combined sheet, you should choose to retrieve all bills, as that will allow you to include your custom columns. The distinct bills version cannot include user information, as you may have potentially put different information for the same bill in different bill sheets and we wouldn't know which to include (as each bill will only have one row).
Click combine, and you will see the combined bill sheet.
A few things to note:
- The combined bill sheet will not be saved in your bill sheet list, it is temporary.
- The maximum limit of 5000 bills per bill sheet does not apply to combined bill sheets, you will see all of the bills regardless of their number.
- It may take some seconds to generate the combined bill sheet, particularly if there are a lot of bills.
- There are two export buttons at the bottom, to export the bill sheet to Excel or as a .CSV file if you want to keep it more permanently.
How to Use the Combine Feature
There are a number of scenarios where you may wish to combine bill sheets in this way:
- If you have user comments against the same set of bills in multiple bill sheets (perhaps each person has their own bill sheet) and you want to compare comments. You can simply combine all the bill sheets, making sure that the user columns are in the template you choose, and sort by bill number. The comments against each bill will then be shown in the list.
- If your total bills exceed 5000 and you want a sheet to include all of them so you can do some research of export the full list.