I’ve been meaning to create a book inventory for a couple of years now. It was getting to the point where I had so many books that I didn’t know which ones I owned and which ones I WANTED to own. I would buy a book from Amazon/Waterstones, I would get home and find out that I already owned it. OR I WOULDN’T buy a book because I thought that I owned it, get home and find out that I didn’t actually own it. So yeah… a book inventory seemed like the perfect thing for me to make. So I opened up Excel and started creating it. It took A VERY VERY VERY long time and it’s going to be an ongoing project as I acquire new books over the months and years, but at least I’ve laid down the foundations!

 

To start off, I put my blog title as a kind of header for the spreadsheet as I wanted to spruce things up a bit. As you can see here, the headers that I have are ‘AUTHOR’, ‘BOOK’, ‘SERIES’, ‘EDITION’, ‘RATING’, ‘FORMAT’, ‘GENRE’, and ‘RELEASE DATE’. The ‘release date’ header is only for books that I have pre-ordered, not for every single book, because that would take absolutely ages. But you will see an example of this later on.

The first two headers: ‘AUTHOR’ and ‘BOOK’ are laid out like this, with the authors being organised in alphabetical order by their last name (like you would find in the library or a book shop). Then, in the ‘BOOK’ column, I – obviously – type in which books I own by this author.

 

 

The next categories are ‘SERIES’ and ‘EDITION’. This bit is pretty much self-explanatory. I type in which series each book belongs to, and if it isn’t part of a series, then I put a ‘/’ to mark this. The next column deals with which edition of the book I have. Now for this, I only put the special editions that I own. And yes, a U.S hardcover is a special edition for me because they’re SO EXPENSIVE!

The next few columns are ‘RATING’, ‘FORMAT’, ‘GENRE’, and ‘RELEASE DATE’. Again, this is self-explanatory. Once I have finished a book, I will type in my rating in the spreadsheet, then the format of the book that I have – which include Paperback, Hardback, audiobook, ebook… In some instances the format is a Graphic Novel, but the format of the graphic novel could be ebook or paperback.

As you have seen in the previous screenshots, some of the books are highlighted blue. This shows the book that I have read. As you can see next to Alexandra Adornetto’s Halo series, there are ‘*’ next to each book. This means that I have read them (because they are highlighted blue) but I have also unhauled them.

 

Another colour key that I use is this pale pink colour. This is to highlight the books that I have pre-ordered, and then I type in when the book comes out. Once I receive the book, I delete the pink highlight.

 

The last colour key that I use is purple. This is to show the books left in the series that I need to buy. So here, you can see that I own Full Metal Alchemist in the 3-in-1 format of volumes 1, 2, and 3 and then volumes 7, 8, and 9. The purple shows that I need to buy the rest of the 3-in-1 format of the series.

 

 

At the top right hand corner of the spreadsheet, I’ve included a key for what each colour means. As you can see here, green means academic books, but I am yet to add these to the spreadsheet because I HAVE SO MANY! It’s going to take me absolutely ages to add them all. But when I do, they are going to be highlighted this light green colour.

So there we have it! There is a little taste of my book inventory. I wish I could add the document to this blog post so you can see the full thing and not just screenshots, but I have no idea how to do that without it being a document that people can edit and change.

It took me a while to figure out how to use Microsoft Edexcel because I’ve never used it before. But I worked it out in the end and I’m really proud of how it’s turned out! Obviously this is going to be an ongoing project because every month, I buy new books, so I will have to keep adding my purchases to the inventory.

I’m glad that I’ve finally done it, because I’ve been meaning to do this for ages! If you have loads of books that you can’t keep track of, then I definitely suggest that you start one.