Reading List Tool

[mae]

I mentioned my Excel thing in the "What are you currently reading?" thread and thought I'd share it with you folks here. Maybe someone will find it useful. The hardcore book geeks I'm attaching it to this post. I hope this isn't against any rules.

To use it you need to have Microsoft Excel. In the attached ZIP I've included a file for the 2007 version, as well as another one compatible with the pre-2007 versions. It's a sample containing two entries, which you'll have to modify as per yourself, obviously. As you enter your data Excel will show you how long it took you to read each book, and your average pages read per day. There will also be a running overall average, as well as total pages read. All in all, it's rather simple and self-explanatory.

Any questions, feel free to ask and demand any adjustments or enhancements

P.S.: Just a quick tip. The best way to start entering your own data is to select the entire Row 4 by mousing over the row marker on the left and clicking it. Then inserting however many new rows you need. Then select the first book row (Row 3), copy it, and paste that all through your rows. Then enter your changes. The data should update accordingly by itself.

[bluelph24]

hmm. i do something similar to this as well. the big exception is that i go into detail as far as the minute, seperate books, short stories, etc.


this is what mine looks like, updated as of a a couple of days ago. as you can see, it's much mor einvolved than yours. i'm not as knowledgable of excel. also, the books that have the dashed out sections for the total pages per (insert time frame here) are books i've read for school. they overlapped on the time i was reading for the other books, so i didn't incorporate time further into my calculations

[mae]

That's interesting, but I'm a little lost in all these numbers You have a very strange way of entering dates and other data. Strange as in "I've never seen that"; not bad-strange.

[bluelph24]

yeah, since i wanted to go to the minute i just developed my own way of entering numbers. minute:hour:day:month:year. the hour is in military time. unfortunally, all of my calculations to get the total minutes is by hand. i don't know how to get the spreadsheet to do that itself

[mae]

Well I never dealt with military time nor this way of entering time, so I couldn't help you. There should be a much simpler way to get Excel to automatically show you data you want, based on pages per minute, pages per hour, etc. I work on a daily basis with Excel, but actually never had to do many time calculations. If you want I can try something.

[bluelph24]

now, that's ok. as you can see, i have 80+ entries and have no interest in going back and changing all of that lol

[mae]

One thing is bothering me though. How can you calculate reading time just based on entering start time and finish time? Let's say you enter a start time of 7:30 PM on March 23, 2009, and finish time of 9:00 AM on April 1, 2009. And the book was 500 pages. You can get a pages per minute or hour, but you weren't reading 24 hours a day. Even as an average that's gonna be way off. My list only shows how long it took to read that book in days, and an average pages per day count (which is also an estimate if you don't read each single day).

[bluelph24]

yeah, i've realized that, as far as reading goes, i may only be reading maybe an hour day on a typical weekday, three to four on weekend day. i just accept any time spent not reading as a loss on the average

[mae]

I've made a few adjustments. No new features but this should just look better, and the header will stay in place as you're scrolling through your long book list up and down.

[bluelph24]

i'm really digging that scrolling header feature. how do you accomplish this?


**nvm, i figured it out

[bluelph24]

sorry about the double post, but i've just finished overhauling my spreadsheet. i really liked your layout and how you ordered somethings, so i incorporated those ideas into mine. and, thanks to you, it is now much more streamlined. still have the issue with time-date thing (only becasue i'm too lazy to go line by line to fix the thing) but, otherwise, i think this is much better

[mae]

I see ten people downloaded it, so I'm wondering if anyone found it useful. Anything you'd like to add or remove? Feel free. Also, I took an idea from bluelph24's file and added a percentage of pages read to a newer version (which tells me I read 12% of It as of now), but if this isn't something useful for folks here there's probably not much reason to upload it.