Share Your eBird Express Template
If you’ve made a template that’s not currently available for download, or have corrections for an existing template, fill out the form below and upload your template. I’ll add it to the eBird Express downloads page, for others to benefit from too.
Is my template appropriate?
All templates should be for national or state / province level checklists. Please do not send regional templates such as county checklists or park checklists, as they will not be added to the downloads page. Of course, you’re free to use regional checklists if you’ve made one and share them with anyone you wish.
Validate your template before sharing
Before sending your template, you should validate the taxonomy with eBird Express. To do this, choose validate taxonomy from the eBird Express ribbon icon (in Excel 2007) or from the eBird Express menu (in Excel 2003) while looking at the template you wish to submit. If any English or scientific names don’t match, these cells will be highlighted in red. To fix them, you can refer to the latest version of eBird’s taxonomy, which was included when you installed eBird Express. Look in the folder My Documents/Bird Notes/eBird supplemental documents, where you’ll see a file called ebird-taxonomy.xlsx. In this way you can see why a name was flagged as invalid.
Can’t find your template when trying to upload it?
The template directory isn’t exactly the easiest folder to find, unfortunately.
On Windows Vista, this directory is:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates
On Windows XP / 2000, this directory is:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
And as if this doesn’t make things hard enough, it turns out that Windows hides the main folder that stores your templates (along with other program folders) to try and keep users from accidentally deleting things. If you can’t see the AppData (on Vista) or Application Data (on XP) folder, then you’ll need to show hidden files and folders by following these easy directions in Windows Vista or Windows XP