This is a little trick in Excel that will help you get the downloaded report from Connect Events into a format that can be more easily ingested by your other systems.

The common issue is that in the downloaded Connect Events reports, the first and last name are in one column (even though they are entered separately in the registration form).  You cannot change the format of the download, but you can easily split the names into two separate columns.

First, download the ‘User Information Report’ from the ‘Reports’>’Summary’ section of your event.  The original report will be in a similar format to the report shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

Now you need to add a couple of extra columns for the ‘split’ names.  Just right-click on the column header and then ‘Insert’ to add two more columns to the right of the existing name column.  Now select the cells you want to ‘split’ (See Figure 2)

Figure 2

With the cells selected, go to the ‘Data’ menu and ‘Text to Columns’.  In the dialogue box, select ‘Delimited’ and ‘Next’, then ‘Space’ and ‘Next’ (deselect any other options), finally click ‘Finish’ in the dialogue box, see Figure 3.

Figure 3

You will now have your names split into two columns as per Figure 4.  You can usually delete the empty column, this would be necessary if you were tracking middle names as well or maybe initials.  If anything ends up in that column then you can clean it up manually I imagine.

Figure 4