A) Go to your Bb course, to the CONTROL PANEL, and select the LIST/MODIFY USERS choice. (Oh, and have EXCEL open also.)
B) Click the LIST ALL tab, and then the LIST ALL button.
C) You'll get at least one page, if not more, of your students - grouped by name, then ID, then email, then student/faculty status.
You want to click-down with the mouse and drag to select, starting just before the word NAME (above the first student line).
D) Drag down to the end of the last line of the students - let go of the mouse button.
Press CTRL-C (for copy) - or go to the Edit menu and select COPY.
Switch over to EXCEL (if both Bb and excel are open, you can ALT-TAB between them).
E) Click in the A1 cell of a blank page, and press CTRL-V (or go to the Edit menu and select PASTE).
Now, WITHOUT CHANGING THE SELECTION, press CTRL-C again (or EDIT -> COPY). {We are going to "wash out" the formating using Excel.}
We are going to use this as our "scratch" page - later we'll just delete this page.
F) Click to a new page (call this our GOOD page), select the A1 cell, RIGHT-CLICK and select PASTE SPECIAL.
G) Select VALUES and then Ok. You should get a nice "clean" list of the names and emails.
[Now, you might be saying to yourselves, "Self, why can't I just use the Paste Special in step E and save all this extra nonsense?" Well, self, even if you try to select "text" as a choice .. you'll get all the information shoved into the first column, with no reliable/consistant way to split them back to the required columns (not even the "text to columns" feature). Trust me on this ...
H) If you have more than one page of emails .. might as well come down to the row just after the last one and click in the A cell. (This will be where we paste-special the next set.)
If you have more than one page of Bb students - keep reading - otherwise you could skip down to item (L)!
I) Back to Bb - click the little arrow to take us to the next page of emails. Select them the same way we did in C and D above.
J) IMPORTANT - when you switch back to Excel - click in the A1 cell of your scratch page (if we don't do this, we run the risk of losing some of our rows when we paste .. trust me!). Then do the regular paste (CTRL-V or Edit -> Paste).
K) Switch to your good page, find that "next row" cell, and do the paste-special-values thing. (Then, if you have more pages, move down to the new "next row" and click the A cell .. go back and repeat steps H-I-J until you are done.
L) Ok, we have all the emails copied over to the good page - we can delete the old page (right click on the name tab of the scratch page, and select DELETE).
Now, you can clean up this page any way you want .. if you want some suggestions, read on ...
I would delete the first to columns (they should be "blank" as long as you copied correctly!). Select the A and B columns and right click and pick DELETE.
M) It would be nice to resize the columns - let's do them all at the same time ... select the remaining columns, and then put the mouse cursor between two of them (that "resizing/insertion" cursor shows up).
Double click on that border line ... hey, look, all the columns auto-sized themselves to account for the largest element - very nice!
N) Might as well sort the mess to get rid of those extra rows ... while the remaining columns are still selected - click the A-Z sort button.
O) This will alphabetically sort the rows (and luckily it is lastnames first in the first column!) - scan down, there will be a bunch of EMAIL rows (depending on how many pages you had to copy over). Select them and delete them.
That's it .. a nice clean auto-spaced email list!
P) If you end up needing to use it .. select the email cells down the column, switch over to your email program and then paste them in.
IMPORTANT : Practice proper emailing ... don't send all those "private" email addresses on the TO line ... send the message with yourself on the TO line, and paste them all in on the BCC line (blind carbon copy).
If you can't find the BCC line, try looking for a "show headers" choice, then it should show up.
