Recording an Excel(®) Macro to Specify Date Ranges for Clinical Data

Using macros in microsoft excel to facilitate cleaning of research data

Background: Retrospective chart review studies may be delayed by inability to export clean clinical data from an electronic medical record (EMR) or data repository. Macros are pre-programmed procedures that can be used in Microsoft Excel to help streamline the process of cleaning clinical datasets.

Objectives: To demonstrate how macros may be useful for researchers at community hospitals and smaller academic health centers that lack informatics support.

Methods: Using an intrinsic function of our institution’s EMR, vital signs and lab results from 20 individual hospitalizations were exported to a spreadsheet. Two macros were developed to sort through these datasets and output them into a specified format. The speed of macro-assisted data cleaning was compared to manual transcription.

Results: Time spent on data cleaning was significantly reduced when using macro-assisted sorting compared to the manual approach for both vital signs (46.5 seconds versus 12.3 minutes per record, a 94% reduction; P < 0.001) and labs (13.7 seconds versus 2.6 minutes per record, a 91% reduction; P < 0.001).

Conclusions:Macros offer a flexible and efficient tool for cleaning large sets of clinical data, particularly when an institution lacks informatics support or EMR functionality to export clinical data in an analysis-ready format.

Automating Phase Change Lines and Their Labels Using Microsoft Excel(R)

Many researchers have rallied against drawn in graphical elements and offered ways to avoid them, especially regarding the insertion of phase change lines (Deochand, Costello, & Fuqua, 2015; Dubuque, 2015; Vanselow & Bourret, 2012). However, few have offered a solution to automating the phase labels, which are often utilized in behavior analytic graphical displays (Deochand et al., 2015). Despite the fact that Microsoft Excel® is extensively utilized by behavior analysts, solutions to resolve issues in our graphing practices are not always apparent or user-friendly. Considering the insertion of phase change lines and their labels constitute a repetitious and laborious endeavor, any minimization in the steps to accomplish these graphical elements could offer substantial time-savings to the field. The purpose of this report is to provide an updated way (and templates in the supplemental materials) to add phase change lines with their respective labels, which stay embedded to the graph when they are moved or updated.