Patent family identifiers being added to US Patent Bibliographic Information in Patent Grabber

I once had to analyze the patent portfolio of a company. They had 179 U.S. patents. So I used Patent Grabber's "US Patent Biblio" feature to start with. That gave me a spreadsheet with the bibliographic information for all 179 patents in a couple of minutes.

But with that many patents, I thought it would be useful to be able to group them into their families. That is why I developed Family-izer(TM). Once I had the family information, I gave each family an arbitrary number and entered those numbers in a new column of the spreadsheet. It took a couple of hours, but when I was done I could sort the spreadsheet by family as well as by any of the other columns.

So now I had a brainstorm. Why spend  a couple of hours entering patent family identifiers, when I could add Family-izer functionality to the US Patent Biblio feature! I should be able to automatically get a spreadsheet that already had each patent family assigned an identifying number. No more manual labor!

I have gotten it working. Now I need just a little more testing. Look for Patent Grabber 5.7 in the near future!