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Export SharePoint group membership names and email addresses to Excel

Before we start, if you’re just wanting to email all members of the group you can “select all” then choose “E-Mail Users” from the action menu when viewing the group membership within SharePoint. This opens an Outlook window with all the addresses pre-populated.

But, if you still need an excel sheet of membership for another purpose (perhaps to format a sign-in sheet, generate documents with mail merge, share the list with others, etc.) follow these steps:

  1. With the group open in SharePoint, copy the URL and note the ID number at the end of the URL
  2. Open a new excel workbook
  3. From the “Data” tab, select “New Query” –> “From Other Sources” –> “From OData Feed“
  4. Paste the group URL in the prompt but delete everything after the site address and replace with the following, replacing “6” with your group’s ID from step 1
    /_api/Web/SiteGroups/GetByID(6)/Users
  5. When prompted for login credentials you’ll use “Windows” for on-prem/server and “Organizational account” for O365.
  6. Click “Edit” once the group loads so we can choose which columns to keep/delete
  7. Ctrl+click the column headers you want to keep
  8. Right-click a header of a column you’re keeping and select “Remove Other Columns”
  9. Close and Load
  10. You should now see your group membership and email addresses (and any other fields you kept). Save this somewhere and, if updates are made in the future, just click “Refresh all” to bring in new members and remove old.

Updated 8/8/2019: Added step 5 to show the login credentials prompt.

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Splitting an Excel column by delimiter

You’re bound to run into an excel sheet where differing data types are joined together in a single column. For example in the following data dates are combined with event names making it impossible to filter or sort by either date or event. By using Excel’s “Text to Columns” feature, we can separate these two distinct data points.

As long as you have a consistent delimiter (in my case, the pipe character “|”) or a pre-determined fixed width, you can easily move the text following the delimiting character (or exceeding the specified width) to the adjacent column (which I’ve inserted in advance to prevent overwriting existing data in the original second column).

  1. Select column or cells you’re splitting
  2. Select the “Data tab” then “Text to Columns”
  3. Choose to split by “delimiter.” Click next.
  4. If your delimiter isn’t an option, enter it as I’ve done (max 1 character) in the “Other” space. Click next.
  5. You can choose to change data formats here, so I’ve made my new first column date format for example. You can always change column data types later as well.
  6. Finish

Now you can sort and filter correctly on the values you separated.

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Quick tip: Prevent #DIV/0! and #VALUE! errors in Excel files

Recently I was helping a client visualize their excel data using Power BI and ran across an error in Power BI when it couldn’t deal with “#DIV/0!” as a cell value in Excel:

“DataFormat.Error: Invalid cell value ‘#DIV/0!’.” 

You get this error in excel whenever you have a calculated formula that is trying to divide by zero or a blank cell. Similarly, you get “DataFormat.Error: Invalid cell value ‘#VALUE!'” typically when your data formats don’t match – like there’s a word in a number-formatted column.

It’s a simple fix: just modify your Excel formula to be wrapped in =IFERROR((YourFormula),0) so that if your formula attempts to divide a value by zero, it returns a value of zero instead of an error code.

=IFERROR(Your_Formula, Value_If_Error)

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Solution: Excel drag to “fill” not working – value is copied, formula ignored

Note: Video of solution at bottom of post.

A client of mine recently ran into an issue I hadn’t seen before. When she would click a formula cell and drag down to calculate it across multiple rows, it only copied the value. The formulas were correct, but the value being shown was from the original cell:
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