If you ever need to review a large group of equivalencies in TES, you should consider using the TES Export option. Any TES Administrator can perform an export by opening the “Manage” menu item in TES, and choosing “Export Options.” This feature is not just designed for exporting equivalencies to your Student Information System; the data can be viewed in just about any spreadsheet or database where it can be searched, sorted, and filtered at whim.
To run an export, read over and select the desired on-screen criteria (see screenshot below). Be sure to leave the export format as “TXT.”
Once you hit the Export button, TES will initiate a file download to your computer. The file will contain data in a tab-delimited text format. You can then open this file with Excel (right click to choose “open with”). Excel should automatically detect the tab-delimited format. If it doesn’t work, open Excel and find the menu option for importing text data. This will start an import wizard that will step you through the process. When prompted, be sure to indicate that the file is delimited and that a tab (not a comma) is the delimiter.
Once you have the data in an Excel spreadsheet, you can (right-click on and) hide any columns you don’t typically use. Equivalency records tend to get spread out across a row and hiding unused columns will bring more of the data into view. For instance, the export allows up to ten courses on the “send” side (the institution at which transfer courses are originating) and ten courses on the “receive” side (the institution that established the equivalency/your institution). These columns appear whether there is data in them or not and most schools never use more than three or four of these columns; the rest can be safely hidden from view.
Some potential uses for this data?
Perhaps you need to create a report for a department that wants to review all the equivalencies where its own courses are the target. Sort the data by the first course appearing in the receive side of the sheet, then scroll down and select the rows with the desired department prefix. Print that selection or cut-and-paste them into a new spreadsheet for the departmental evaluators.
Or maybe you want to find all the equivalencies to a course that your institution has recently dropped from the curriculum. Again, sort the data by the first send course and find the rows targeting the course in question. Use this list as a check-sheet for finding the equivalencies in TES and applying a date-cap or deleting them.
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