Using Excel in family history helps you plan your research, track your research tasks, summarise and analyse information, and document your findings.
Excel is a fantastic tool for family history research.
Wondering if Excel is right for your research? Let’s take a closer look.
While this page focuses on Microsoft Excel, the same approaches can also be applied in other spreadsheet programs.
Is Excel hard to use for family history?
Not at all! You don’t need to use complex formulas or advanced features—although you can, if you want to. A basic knowledge of Excel is all you need:
- entering data
- formatting data (colours, bold, lines and so on)
- sorting and filtering data
- hiding rows or columns
- adding hyperlinks (optional).
Why Excel is a powerful tool for family history
Excel helps you manage data
Excel organises information into rows and columns – ideal for genealogical data. It helps you:
- store and organise data
- plan your research tasks
- analyse and explore your findings
- display and illustrate your information in different ways.
You don’t need to use complex calculations—just the basics are powerful enough to support your research.
Family history creates complex datasets
Family history generates a lot of data. Even with just 5000 individuals in your tree, a conservative estimate of 60 data points per person adds up to over 300,000 pieces of information. Excel is designed to handle this kind of scale—and helps you make sense of it all.
If you’re comfortable working directly on a computer and don’t need to print things out to work on them, Excel has the added benefit of not being restricted by page size like Word. That means your tables can run over multiple pages and still be easy to manage.
For example, you can put 2000 DNA matches into a table with 38 columns and still manage it efficiently in Excel. It’s also easy to expand later if you’ve set up your spreadsheet thoughtfully.
Use Excel to spot patterns and solve problems
Excel isn’t just a place to store data—it’s a place to think through your research, make discoveries, and test your ideas. The ability to sort, filter, and restructure your information allows you to identify patterns, inconsistencies, gaps and new connections that you might otherwise miss.
Articles about using Excel in family history
Here are some blog posts about different applications of Excel in family history.
- Using Excel to track birth, death and marriage records
- How to create a research plan in Excel
- Using Excel with DNA test results
- Using Excel to plan family history and improve accuracy
- Use Excel to plan family history and manage searches
- Excel Genealogy Timelines: Complete How To Guide
- Create a Master Genealogy Research Plan in Excel
For more tips on Excel and other family history topics
You can read more about improving the quality of your family history and how I use Excel in my book, The Good Genealogist.
Find out more about using DNA in Family History and Planning Your Family History.