Sunday, February 16, 2025

Scythebill 17.1 - more spreadsheet options for reports and checklists

Scythebill 17.1.0 is now available.  This release includes some new features for report and checklist spreadsheets, and some . As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.


More options for spreadsheets

When saving a report as a spreadsheet, you previously had only one "sort by" option.  It wasn't obvious, but this sorted the species, not the sightings.  If you wanted a list of species in taxonomic order, you couldn't have any sighting other than the earliest.  So if you wanted to generate a report with last-seen dates, there wasn't a great way to do it:

Old spreadsheet options

Now, you can sort both species and sightings, and the dialog has been reorganized:

New spreadsheet options

Checklist spreadsheets have added a similar option. There, the only support was showing your first sighting from the checklist area. So, if you were traveling to Peru for the first time, there wasn't a way to create a checklist that shows where you had seen those species outside of Peru. Now, you can:

New checklist spreadsheet options


There's four options for the sighting - the first sighting (if any) from Peru, the most recent (if any) from Peru, your first sighting anywhere, and the most recent sighting anywhere.

Other changes

  • Wildlife Recorder imports now automatically preserve the "Very common", "Common", and "Scarce" approximate numeric counts (-3, -2, and -1 respectively) by copying that text into the sighting notes.
  • Tabs in location names are no longer converted to spaces after saving and loading.
  • Users who hit the previous bug and were very unlucky could get into a state where their .bsxm files were un-loadable. Scythebill now recovers from this state automatically.