Kudos to the Recovery Board for responding so quickly to user complaints that recipient report data on Recovery.gov was spread over some 120 files had parsing issues when opened in a spreadsheet. Since Friday, the Board has added to Recovery.gov's Download Center a single file containing all prime and sub-recipient reports. Not only that, but the file is a Microsoft Excel file, which means that commas appearing in some of the data fields won't confuse your spreadsheet application like the CSV files originally posted.

Updated below

While we applaud the Recovery Board for making Recvoery Act recipient reports available in a downloadable format (CSV files), we are a bit frustrated that the one has to pull together some 180 individual files into one spreadsheet to see all the data in one space.

Today, as promised, the Recovery Board published the first round of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. As explained in our Watcher from yesterday, this first round is only the contracting information, which represents a small slice of total Recovery Act funding. The rest, in the form of grant and loan information, will be released on Oct. 30.

As we wait for tomorrow's recipient reports to be published, some news articles are starting to leak out state by state. For those looking to get a sneak peak of what's happening in their state, many of the state agencies in charge of collecting recipient information at the state and local level have given previews to local papers. The Recovery Board itself, though, which is charged with publishing the recipient reports, is keeping mum and sticking to the Oct. 15 publishing date, so finding national level statistics is difficult. In an early morning press release, however, the Recovery Board released one tiny piece of useful information. According to the Board, so far, over 112,000 recipients have submitted data reports to FederalReporting.gov, the reporting site which feeds Recovery.gov.