I’ve had a good bit of frustration that there is NOT a way to do this without some legwork. With over 600 devices in my building alone that are managed by a management system that requires serial numbers, sometimes it is handy for our techs to have a list of serial numbers that they can copy and paste into their system when they need to push out a bunch of apps to a lot of devices. Sure, for the offhand it is easy enough…
I know some of my librarian friends make this list by hand ever year, but I need to save time. I don’t have time to check the iPad out, pop over to excel, scan the barcode, and then copy and paste the serial number into the spreadsheet. So here I am.
The first thing I did was create an iPad Checkouts report in Follett. Screenshots below of the steps to create this report. Of course, some of your fields might look different than mine… you might need to check some boxes that I didn’t and vice versa. Customize to your needs.
After you run your report, you need to save it to your computer as an Excel file.
After you have your Excel file ready, you need to run the iPad Info report in Follett. Steps are below.
You are going to save and run this report as well. You will need to download this report as an Excel file.
Open the iPad Checkouts Excel file and the iPad Info file. Copy the iPad Info into a new sheet in the iPad Checkouts Excel file. You can now close the iPad Info file.
The first sheet in your Excel document should be iPad Checkouts. Then the second sheet should be the information from the iPad Info file.
On the second sheet, highlight all of the data in Columns A and B (Barcode and Serial Number columns). Name this List1 by clicking in the box with the arrows and entering that information. See the screenshot below for additional help (look in the left corner).
Add a column on the iPad checkouts sheet next to the Barcode column. Name this column Serial Numbers.
In the serial number column, click on cell 2.
Enter =VLOOKUP ($I2,List1,2,FALSE)
The forumla will run and enter into cell 2 in that column. Double click in the corner of the cell to copy that formula into the rest of the column. It will run.
Boom, done.
One special note that I have noticed is that this file can get wonky when the tech people are trying to work with it in Google Drive. They really need to download it and work with it in Excel.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if this was useful. I never know… this might be one of those things that it was super obvious to everyone but me as to how to do.