How to Import Your Medium Stats to a Microsoft Spreadsheet
By: Erica Martin
Tags: Ｍedium, Analytics, Writing

I love the stats that Medium’s stats page provides, but I also like being able to see those stats in a spreadsheet of my own, so I can figure out what kind of stories get the best traction. I have been looking for a good way to do this for a while, and I finally figured how to display the stats on my stories using Microsoft Excel and a simple Medium stats grabbing tool for Chrome. I’ll explain how to do it in this article.

What you need:

The Medium Enhanced Stats Chrome extension

Microsoft Excel

If you don’t already have the Medium Enhanced Stats Chrome Extension, you can download it using the link above. Once you have it downloaded and set up, go to your Medium page and download your stats. The stats grabber tool downloads your stats in a CSV format; this can be difficult to understand because all the information is listed in one column. It looks kind of like this:

Screenshot taken by the author

If you’re at all like me, you probably like being able to see your stats in graph format.

Luckily there’s an easy way to turn this gobbledygook into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that’s easy to read an d understand:

Open a new Microsoft Excel sheet

2. Go to Data and choose “From Text/CSV”

3. Load the CSV file you downloaded from the Medium Stats Grabber and click “Import”.

4. In just a few seconds, a screen will pop up that shows you what your data looks like. Choose whether you want to show just the first 200 rows, or the entire data set, and then click “Load.”

Screenshot taken by the author

5. You’ll end up with a spreadsheet that looks like this:

Screenshot by the author

Filtering your data

If you want to filter your data before you create a graph, click on “filter” and then choose the column you want to filter. In this example I chose Views:

Screenshot taken by the author.

Creating your graph

Highlight the columns you want to include in your graph. Make sure to include the column headers. In this example, I chose Title, Views, and Reads. To highlight columns that aren’t next to each other, hold down Control when you’re highlighting one column, let go of it, click on your second column, hold down Control again and highlight that column. Repeat this for each non-adjacent column you want to highlight.

Once you’ve selected all the data you want to include in your graph, click on “Insert”, go to “Charts,” then click “Recommended Charts.” Microsoft Excel shows you the charts they recommend and provides information on the purpose of each one. For this article I chose column chart.

After you’ve chosen the chart you want to use and inserted it in your spreadsheet, take a little time to tweak the appearance of it. Depending on the type of chart you’ve chosen, you might want to remove gridlines. You’ll also want to give your chart a title and change the series labels if you need to. Here are a few examples of what your graph might look like:

Graph with gridlines

Graph without gridlines

Line chart with gridlines

That’s all there is to displaying your Medium stats in Excel. I know it seems like a lot of steps, but once you go through them all you’ll have a good representation of how your articles are performing, which will help you write better articles in the future.

Editor’s note: Shortly after I published this article, I learned that the Medium Enhanced Stats Chrome Extension had stopped working. In case it’s not working for a while, you can also use the Medium Stats Grabber Chrome Extension to do the same thing. Just click the extension, download the spreadsheet, and follow the same process outlined above.