This is by no means a definitive guide on how to use Google Sheets or Excel but this is what works for me and is more geared towards people who aren’t that familiar with spreadsheet software and dealing with CSV files.

Firstly, you’re going to need your submission history CSV file from Prolific, you can get this by going to your Submissions page scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the Download full submission history button, this can take a bit of time to download depending on the number of studies you’ve done, so give the system a bit of time, if you keep clicking on it, it will just keep requesting a new file from the Prolific servers and you’ll end up with multiple copies.

The guides below might seem a bit longwinded but I want to make it as idiot-proof as possible and once you’ve mastered the process it only takes a few clicks to do.

I’m going to start with Google Sheets as it is a little bit easier to handle and if you have a Gmail account you can access Google Sheets for free.

1)	First click Blank spreadsheet.
2)	As prolific is a UK company and to stop any formatting errors at the start it is best if you change your location for this spreadsheet, which you can do by going to file, settings, under Locale and changing it to the United Kingdom, ignore the Time zone and save settings (you can change the date format to match your location at a later point)
3)	When you have the Blank spreadsheet open, go to File at the top of the page and click Import.
4)	Click on Upload and browse for the submission history CSV file you downloaded from Prolific.
5)	You will then get a window with some options, leave everything as it is (Make sure that the Convert text to numbers, dates and formulas is ticked. Leave Import location as Replace spreadsheet and Separator type as Detect automatically) and click Import data.
6)	When it has imported the data select row number 1 by clicking on it once this should highlight the whole row.
7)	Right-click on any of the cells in row 1 go down to View more row actions and click Freeze up to row 1
8)	Then select the whole of column B by clicking on the cell with B in it and it should highlight the whole column, holding the ctrl button on your keyboard deselect the cell with a left click of the mouse with the word Reward in it.
9)	Go up to Format at the top of the page and click Number then Currency, follow the same process for the Bonus column C, as you did for column B.
10)	If you highlight either column B or C at the bottom of the window to the right, you’ll see your totals for each of those columns.

Next, how to separate the date and time that you started and completed each study

1)	Select column D so that the whole column is highlighted to do this just click on the cell with D in it, right click and click insert 1 column to the right, which will make a new blank column E.
2)	Select column D again and then holding down the ctrl button on your keyboard deselect the cell with Started At in it.
3)	Then go up to Data at the top of the page and click Split text to columns you should now see the date and time have been separated.
4)	Select column D again and deselect the Started At cell as you did before, then go to Format at the top of the page and click Number and then Date. (This should show you the date in the UK date format)
5)	Select column E so the column is again highlighted and again go to Format, Number and select Time.
6)	For the Completed At column F just repeat the above steps as you did for column D, remembering to insert a new column to the right of column F. (if you find for some reason that column does not split, at the bottom of the page you’ll see a small box that is title Separator (with detect automatically) just click on that and select Space)
7)	Date format (optional to you) if you want to change the date format, then go to File, Settings, Locale and change it to your location from the United Kingdom to whatever you want. Then again highlight column D and deselect Started At, then go to Format, Number and Date, this should then change the date format to your liking.
8)	Repeat this process for column F for the Completed At date format as above.

You can now sort the spreadsheet however you want, by Date, Status and so on and then play with the data however you want to create graphs, tables, calculations per month, and how long you spent on a study the list is endless really but it is not something I can put into an easy guide but I’m more than happy to help if you want more from the spreadsheet.

If you would prefer to use Excel, I will add a guide to this post a bit later but you can easily download this newly created spreadsheet as an Excel file and just use it.

Any questions just ask here or you can DM me and hope this may help some of you, I want to add that currency conversions are a bit more difficult as PayPal changes theirs quite often, so to that you’ll need to first sort the data in the spreadsheet to what date ranges you want beforehand then do all the calculations.