At some point you will want to copy or export your collections to use in your assignments, or perhaps share them with a friend or colleague.

There are several ways of doing this. To view them, go into a collection and select the ‘triple dot’ button at the top-right of the menu. We will go through how to use each of these methods.

Send to Excel – The Collection is exported to an Excel spreadsheet file, in a tabular format. This is a good option if you want to perform data analysis on your Collection items.

Send to OneNote – The Collection is sent to a OneNote notebook. OneNote notebooks can also be synced to the cloud.

This is a good option when you have a mix of text and images in your Collection.

Send to Word – The Collection is sent to a Microsoft Word document in a written format, with images included. This is a good option when you have text that you want to quote in your assignments which you need to reference back to.

Copy All – Copy all Collection items to the clipboard. This is a quick and easy way of getting your data out of the Collection.

In addition to this, you can select Open All to open all the web pages from where your Collection items originated. Each web page will be opened in a new tab.

Copying a collection to the clipboard

The simplest way to export your collection to another application is to use the ‘Copy all’ feature, to copy to the clipboard.

To copy your collection to the clipboard, go to the triple dot menu and select Copy all.

You can now paste your collection into another application.

If you paste your collection to a text field that can display pictures (e.g. Microsoft Word), the text, images, and links from your collection will be pasted.

If you paste your collection to a text-only text field, the text and links from your collection will be pasted. The website address of your images will be pasted.

Here is the Sheffield collection pasted into Microsoft Word.

Sending your collection to Microsoft Word

From the triple dot menu, select Send to Word.

A word document containing your collection items will now open. It will either open within Word Online, or will be opened in your Word desktop app, depending on your settings.

Here is the collection opened in the desktop Word app and Word Online.

When you export your collection to Word, a bibliography is automatically created which links your collection items to their origin. Scroll down the page to view the bibliography for your collection items.

The bibliography is created using Word’s inbuilt referencing tools. If you wish to find out more about this, the library has excellent resources on the Word referencing tool.

Export your collection to OneNote

OneNote is a note-taking app from Microsoft. It is free to use with a Microsoft account, and can be used online or via a Windows 10 app.

You can add text, images, audio, and drawings to a OneNote notebook. Your notebooks are saved to the cloud, and you use your Microsoft account to access them.

To use OneNote on the web, go to OneNote.com (Microsoft account required). To use the OneNote app on Windows, go to the OneNote page on the Microsoft Store.

Press on Send to OneNote.

A new window appears, showing the available OneNote notebooks in your Microsoft account.

Choose a notebook to export into by selecting it. You can then either export directly to the notebook or choose a pre-existing section within the notebook to export to.

In our ‘Tasks’ notebook we already have a notebook section called ‘Sheffield’, so we’ll export here. Select the Save button to complete the export.

Your collection is now imported into your OneNote notebook. Here’s how it looks in the OneNote web app:

Or you can open the notebook in the OneNote app in Windows:

Sending your collection to Microsoft Excel

The process for exporting to Microsoft Excel is a similar process to the ones outlined above. Instead, you would select Send to Excel from the 'triple dot ' menu.

The collection is exported to an Excel spreadsheet file, in a tabular format. This is a good option if you want to perform data analysis on your collection items.