Working with the Report Manager

Each time you generate a report, it’s automatically saved to a little corner
of the AdSense world — the Report Manager. To get your hands on reports
saved to the Report Manager, click the Reports Manager link on the Reports
tab. Reports are collected here so that you can view them online or download
them in CSV (Comma Separated Value) format, the standard used by most
spreadsheet programs. To download the report, just click the CSV link, and
use the Save As dialog box that appears to choose the location you want the
report saved to and to choose a name for the report. When you’ve entered
this information, click Save.
After you download a report and save the file to your hard drive, you can
open it in Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet program that opens CSV
files — Google Docs & Spreadsheets, for example.
For example, here’s how to open the file in Microsoft Excel:
1. Launch Excel and then choose File➪Open.
The Open dialog box appears.
2. In the Open dialog box, browse to the file you saved to your hard
drive, select the file, and then click Open.
Excel’s Text Import Wizard appears,
The file that’s provided by AdSense is a delimited file — the columns of
data are literally separated. On the first screen of the wizard, you don’t
need to change anything.
3. Click Next.
The second page of the wizard appears.
4. In Step 2 of the wizard, select the delimiter — what separates each
column of the spreadsheet you’re importing — and then click Next.
In this case, the delimiter is a tab (because you usually tab from one
column to the next). That’s probably already selected in the wizard.
5. (Optional) In the final page of the wizard, feel free to change the formatting
of the columns that you’re importing by clicking anywhere in
the column and then selecting the proper formatting from the options
in the upper-left corner of the wizard.
For this file, the formatting for all the columns should be General.
You can see your formatting without clicking each column by looking at
the very first cell at the top of each column. This cell doesn’t appear on
the spreadsheet, but in this wizard view, it shows you what type of formatting
is already in place.
6. After you check or adjust the formatting, click Finish to complete the
importing process.
The Excel spreadsheet opens. If you want to keep it in Excel format, you
have to resave the file as an Excel workbook.
If you really don’t want an offline copy of the report, you don’t have to save
the file to your hard drive. Truth is, you can access your reports from the
AdSense Web site for quite a while — about a year, in fact. After that period of
time, reports get deleted from the site.