ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Experiment page > Setting up treatment groups and animals > The Animals spreadsheet

The Animals spreadsheet

Tip - if you right click on the spreadsheet a menu will open which includes an option to specify whether pressing the 'Return' key on the keyboard should move to the next cell down or the next cell across in the spreadsheet.

Introduction

The Animals spreadsheet shows information about all the animals in your experiment in one place. It provides an efficient location to enter data about the animals and is particularly useful if you are manually assigning animals to their treatment groups.

To access the Animals spreadsheet you should switch to the Experiment page and select the View animals button, the spreadsheet will then be shown on the right-hand side of the page.

Entering animal treatments

To specify the animals' treatments you simply have to type in the relevant treatment code against each animal. If you want to see which treatment corresponds to which code, you can select the Reveal treatment coding button in the ribbon bar, although of course, you should carefully consider the repercussions of doing this if you are running your experiment blind.

You can edit, or delete, an animal's treatment codes at any time. If you delete a code then the relevant animal will simply be recorded as 'unassigned' - i.e. not part of any treatment group.

Specifying whether the animals are lighter or darker than the apparatus

One of the options in the Protocol specifies whether the animals are lighter or darker than the background of the apparatus. Normally you will be able to select one of the options and ANY-maze will apply it to all the animals in your experiment.

However, you might be working with different strains of animal and thus some may be lighter and some darker than the apparatus. In this situation you can specify this in the protocol, and ANY-maze will then include a column in the Animals spreadsheet for you to specify, for each animal, whether it is lighter or darker than the background. To specify the setting for an animal just type either 'L' or 'D' in the appropriate  cell - ANY-maze will complete the entry with the word 'Lighter' or 'Darker'.

If this column doesn't appear in your spreadsheet, it simply means that the protocol specifies that all animals are either lighter or darker than the apparatus and therefore the system doesn't need to ask you about each animal individually.

Entering animal 'field' data

If the experiment protocol includes any fields for recording information about animals, the Animals spreadsheet will include one column for each of them.

For numeric fields, such as an animal's weight, you should enter the relevant value - the units will be shown in parentheses in the column's title.

For choice fields, such as an animal's sex, you should enter one of the field's choices. In fact ANY-maze will auto-complete entries as you type. For example, if the choices are 'Male' and 'Female' then as soon as you type 'M' the system will complete the entry with the word 'Male' because what you're typing doesn't match any other entry. This usually means that you only need to enter the first letter or two for choice field entries.

For text fields you can enter anything you like up to a limit of 80 characters. Remember that you can't use text fields in any analysis so whenever possible using numeric or choice fields is preferable.

Specifying the position of movable zones

If an experiment's protocol includes any movable zones (i.e. zones which can adopt different positions in different tests) and these zones are defined as only changing position between animals, then the spreadsheet will include a column for each of the zones.

For example, in a water-maze you might have an island which the animals have to learn how to find. To control against possible effects of island position, you decide to locate the island in different positions for different animals - of course, for an individual animal it will remain in the same place otherwise he'll never learn where it is! So, in this case, you might specify that for Animal 1 the island is in the North West, for Animal 2 it's in the South West, and so on.

You should enter the name of the zone position for each animal in the relevant zone columns. In the above example, you'd enter 'North West' for Animal 1 in the 'Island position' column. These columns will auto-complete so you probably won't need to type in the whole of the position's name.

If you leave a cell blank then the relevant zone's position will simply be undefined for the animal, you can always come back later and specify what it is.

Setting animals' status

The Animals spreadsheet always includes a column for the animals' status. Animals can have one of the following statuses which you can set by simply typing the status into this column:

Although you can change an animal's status here, it's usually easier to do this on the Animal details report. The only exception to this is when an animal which has received no tests is set to Deleted status - in this case the animal won't have an 'Animal details report' and therefore the only way you can 'undelete' it is to change its status here.

The status column features auto-complete, so in fact you generally only need to type in the first letter of the status - the rest will be filled in automatically.

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ANY-maze help topic T0746