cataloging a book collection

E

Elena

I was asked to help catalogue a friend's rather large personal librar
(approx. 3,000 books).

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I should go about doing tha
in excel.

Title/author/keyword search that would return the book number and som
additional info is all I need.

I'm not very familiar with excel so it would be a great help i
somebody could give me a basic idea of how to start, I would try t
learn as I go along after that.

Thank you
 
D

Dave Peterson

It'll be mostly a typing exercise. (well, maybe copy|paste, too.)

But my suggestion is to put each field into a different column--only use one row
per entry. (If you have comments for an entry, don't put them on a different
row--just use alt-enters when you populate a cell.)

If you put your keywords in one column, you could apply data|filter|autofilter
and then a custom filter using "Contains" to find all the rows with that
keyword.

Save often and backup your workbooks.

===
Decide how you want to enter titles that start with "The", "A", "An":

The Sum of All Fears
or
Sum of All Fears, The

Same with author--I'd put each name (last, first, middle initial) in 3 separate
columns. It's much easier to combine later than separate.

Remember to save often and backup!

And you'll want to add a few columns later.
(Loaned to, Date loaned, Date Returned (maybe))

And since you're doing lots of typing, remember to save often and backup your
files!
 
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