My Book Catalogue

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I have promised to myself to catalogue my books to avoid buying the same books twice (as of current count, I have three books twice bought). Today, I will show you how I have been achieving this so far. It’s not really the perfect method for me because apparently I cannot export the photos to excel. I know there are a lot of apps that are available, both for computers and mobile, but I’m really…finicky.

For my book catalogue, I am looking for the following:

• Completely customizable (I can change the size, data to be inserted, type of data, type of menus, title of menus, etc)
• Can attach photos or can download photos (like with Calibre)
• Can be exported (either to Excel or other formats) with all the complete inputs and attached photos
• Can be viewed by image, title, etc (like in ebook readers)

As I said…finicky.

Because my boyfriend has not yet gotten around to doing something that will fit to my tastes (he’s in IT), I have settled down to doing things manually. I have tried Excel but it was such a hassle going back and forth across several columns. I then tried Microsoft Access. It was my first time to play around with it extensively but now I’m quite comfortable with my form.

If you’re unfamiliar with Access, I suggest giving yourself a couple of hours to familiarize yourself with it. You can play around with it and navigate until you’re familiar with it. Anyway, after hours (or maybe days) of playing around with it, I finally ended up with this:



I wish I can show you how I ended up with this but it has taken a lot of fiddling around and just testing out every tab in there until I ended up with this. I wish I can make a tutorial (I actually tried while writing this) until I realized I don’t know how to teach you exactly since I’m a noob myself. I’m also thinking of turning this into a template but I don’t know how to do that yet.

Basically, what I can do with my current template is resize everything, tweak the type of input data menu thing, change the titles of the input boxes (i.e. Book Code, Author 1) etc and include an image. It also has an Item History. I think I actually downloaded a template before but I cannot for the life of me remember where. But I do remember I heavily tweaked it to get to this. However, my current template is limited as it cannot export the images attached, only the data, and I cannot isolate any of the entries to only show all images or just titles or authors. I think I’ll just finish cataloguing my books and pass them all off to my boyfriend and let him worry about that hehe.

How about you, what do you use to keep track of all your books? Would sure love to get some tips!