The BLS Spreadsheet (v7.15 2024) can be used for all habitats, including churchyards. It now includes a dropdown list to help with typing in names but please be careful with this if you use it, it is easy to select the wrong option (e.g. Cladonia rangiferina rather than Cladonia rangiformis). There are also lists of synonyms, current names and BLS numbers, as well as the substrate and scale habitat codes, each included as a worksheet within the spreadsheet for your reference.
The spreadsheet uses the taxon dictionary as it was in August 2024 so some of the names displayed back in the green columns may be unfamiliar, but you don't need to know these and can still enter the old names or the BLS numbers to the white columns as before. The spreadsheet will do the rest, so please do not type anything into the green columns. If it fails to recognize what you have typed in we will sort that out as part of the import process.
It helps us if you can send in a separate spreadsheet for each vice county for which you have records, and also separate out any churchyard records, as that is how the database is organised. The spreadsheet will take up to 5,000 record lines so you can use it to accumulate records for the VC over a period of time if you wish, but we are always happy to receive smaller numbers of records for individual sites as well.
This spreadsheet is designed to be used in modern versions of Excel and so is in .xlsx format, but it should also work in OpenOffice or under windows emulation. If you have an older or non-windows computer that can't run it we can supply a cut-down version.
The Guidelines document includes help on using the spreadsheet and our substrate and scale habitat codes, and the handout from the training session run at Cober Hill in March 2019 may also be useful. Both are a bit out of date but we will be updating them, and recording short video tutorials as well, in the next few months.