BillTrack50 allows you to save and track bills in bill sheets. However, there may be times when you want to take information and export it to other applications such as MS Excel so you can use it outside of BillTrack50. That's where our export functions comes in, so below I will run through how to export content.
Bill and Regulation Sheets
The Export buttons live at the bottom of every bill and regulation sheet:
Spreadsheets
If you click Excel, as you'd expect your bill sheet will be exported to your downloads folder as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file:
If you click CSV, it will be exported as a 'comma-separated values' file which will allow you to open it with other spreadsheet applications such as Google Sheets.
Reports
If you click Report, you will be taken to the Report set up screen. Here, you can give your report a title, choose a logo if you have uploaded one (here's a demonstration of how to upload a logo) and choose an appropriate template. Then click Run, and after a few seconds a PDF report will drop into your downloads folder.
Before creating a report, you will want to be sure that the bill sheet is just showing the bills you want in your report and that you have a suitable template set up. Here's a detailed explanation of how to create reports. Your final report will look like this:
Map
If you click Map you will see a map of the US color coded to show where your bills are from. If you hover over a state, it will tell you the number of bills you have in that state. Not a true export, but useful for seeing the distribution of bills if you have a multi-state bill sheet. You could take a screenshot if you wanted to use it elsewhere, but it would be better to use our map widget for that. See a demonstration of map widgets here.
Similar
This is not strictly speaking an export, as when you click it you will get an additional tab on your bill sheet with AI-generated suggestions of similar bills. Read more about this feature here.
Legislator Votes
Anywhere you see the name of a legislator in BillTrack50, it will be a clickable link. That will take you to the legislator page where you can see a wealth of information about the legislator including contact details, sponsored bills and their staff. Read this post to find out more about legislator pages.
If you click on the Votes tab, you will see a list of the legislator's 100 most recent votes. At the bottom right there is an Export button and if you click that it will download a CSV file of all their votes, not just the last 100. This can be useful if you want to look back at their voting record for previous sessions or conduct research.
