It’s been a long-term goal of mine to keep a list of books owned; I’ve probably been wanting to do it since my early 20s, but never took the time/energy to actually complete a whole list. I think at one point I had over 1,000 books and I got about halfway through them before giving up on the project.
Hopefully that won’t happen this time. I’ve put hours into modifying the 2022 reader spreadsheet template from Reader Voracious and ended up with some lovely stats! I was primarily interested in documenting where the authors are from so I can get a top level regional view of the perspectives I’m reading (and missing), but ended up compiling a lot of little graphs and charts to see my library at-a-glance.
I’ve never used some of these features of Google Sheets before… I mean, I’ve never had a reason to use the geocharts and produce a map, so why would I? Although it kind of feels like professional development, it’s been a fun experience learning the correct formulas to display the information I want.
For example: The regional charts capture how many authors are from those areas, each only counted once (despite owning many books by them). To simplify the spreadsheet, I only have one tab where I put all the data. I didn’t want to have to fill out a million pages! Because of that, each author is listed more than once depending on how many books I have by them… and the completionist in me also wanted to make sure all values associated with each book/author are filled out, even if they repeat. I had to figure out how to grab unique values for the authors & where they live without including the # of books each one has written, or duplicate information about where they’re from. I used my first ever VLOOKUP and I’m never looking back!
If you are interested in seeing my stats as they update, check out the Library Stats and Regional Stats pages. (The Library Stats page shows you how many books I’ve entered so far.) The scope of this project is solely to track my owned books and the spreadsheet doesn’t track reading habits or progress or anything (although I will come and check when I’m reading/finished reading things). If you’re interested in those kinds of stats, I’m keeping track using The Story Graph.
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