All About Books

Spreadsheet: All the Books [in progress]

I got a lot of input for my latest spreadsheet and hence made a lot of changes after sharing it. This time I want to get input before I finish and share it AND have some beta users to prevent errors.

The spreadsheet: All the Books

Usually I have one spreadsheet for every year and as much as I like making a new spreadsheet each year (and I’ll definitely keep on doing it) and love start filling a new one, I always wanted to have just one spreadsheet with all my books: Books that I read, books that I own but are unread, books I want to have. My current ideas for this spreadsheet are:

Tab: All

This will not only be the tab that has a list of all the books but will also be almost the only tab that has to be filled with data by yourself. My current plans include the following values for each book:

  • Title
  • Series
  • Author
  • Gender (Author)
  • Genre
  • Audience
  • Format
  • Pages
  • Publisher
  • Published (date)
  • Bought (date)
  • Rating
  • Read (date)
  • Fields for up to 9 rereads (dates)

I was thinking of maybe adding a column to mark a book as owned/library copy/… and maybe another column for the expenses. If I add both, I could also calculate how much one saves by getting books from the library. My 2016 spreadsheet also has a Tag column which I could add again.
(If you wish to have any of these features, please mention them in the form below)

Tabs: filtered lists

As of right now there will be three additional tabs that filter the previous list of all books:

  • TBR: will list all books that you own (=the date for Bought is set) but are unread
  • Wishlist: books you want to read but don’t own yet
  • Filtered: this list will be a list filtered by a given year. Only books (re)read that year will be listed

Other lists that I currently don’t intent to implement but could if people want to:

  • A list of books released in a give year
  • A list of books acquired in a given year

(If you wish to have any of these lists, please mention them in the form below)

Statistics

I intend to have three different tabs for statistics: one for all books and one for just a given year (according to the date you read the book). These two will both show roughly the same kind of statistics:

  • Number of books read*
  • Pages read*
    • Distribution of how many books have how many pages
    • Biggest/smallest book
    • Average number of pages/book
  • Number of books acquired and expenses*
  • Number of series/standalones
    • how many 1st/2nd/3rd/… books in series
  • Number of different authors and most read author
  • Distribution of format, genre, audience, gender, rating, publisher and publication year

Maybe I will also add a feature so you would be able to choose two different categories of the listed above and their values and get stats on those. Another idea would be to have a tab that lists all authors and how many books they each have in the list.

*overall as wells as monthly/yearly overview

A third tab shows statistics about the TBR (owned but unread books):

  • Number of books
  • Number of pages to read
  • Average number of days since the book was acquired
  • Distribution of format, genre, audience, gender, rating, publisher and publication year

Goodreads Import

As it would be quite a lot of work to enter every book into this spreadsheet, I’m going to make it possible to import your GR data.

 

These are all the things I intend to implement so far (minus the additional ideas I listed, those are just maybes). I might add more while I’m working on it and I’m always open for more ideas.

If you have any suggestions and/or want to be a beta user, please fill out this form.

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  • This is so great. I’m excited that I will be able to import goodreads data. I’m currently using your 2016 spreadsheet. I love that you are so committed to spreadsheets and statistics because you are so much better with formulas than I am.

  • This sounds so great! I never really get to record my books because I ha e no idea how to do it in a great way, but this sounds amazing! Im filling in the form right now :)

  • I love how you’re adding all these details now! Gonna be some epic spreadsheet right there. Personally though, I prefer tracking with Excel over Google Spreadsheets since that allows me to use it offline as well.

    • You can use and edit google drive data offline too!
      And I just can’t go back to Excel anymore, I would be missing some essential functions.

  • I know I would probably the only one who would need such a feature but would it be possible to add separated statistics for audiobooks so that I could enter the minutes I’ve listened to and get statistics like “minutes/month”, “average audiobook length” etc.? That would be really cool because right now I’m always entering the page numbers of the printed copies which falsifies the statistics a little bit :D

    (I also filled out the form to go the official way xD)

    • Shouldn’t be a problem :D
      (Should have told me earlier, I could have added something to the 2016 spreadsheet :D)

  • Wow! You’re so cool for doing this. I really like this. I’m using Nori’s 2016 ARC spreadsheet, but I adapted it. But I’d like to try this out too! Good luck!

  • Melanie Valente

    I love this idea! Also a huge fan of there being a way to mark something as a library copy and for there to be a way to track expenses. I currently use your 2016 spreadsheet and I absolutely love it, so this new one would be so awesome!

  • You’re spreadsheets are always the greatest, and this one seems like the monster to end all. At this rate, your spreadsheets might just replace goodreads. lol Cannot wait to see the final product.

    • haha, thanks! I wouldn’t mind having a say in all the things GR should add and work with them instead on making spreadsheets! :D

  • Definitely would like to have the “owned/library copy/…” column, also it would be great if it had “arc/earc” on this column (idk if you’re thinking for it to be for us to write in, or is going to be pre-put information like the target audience in your 2016 column).

Jan 10, 2016