Liturgical Year Resources – Spreadsheet

A few years ago my friend Anne inspired me when she shared how she had compiled an inventory of her collection of saint books. Anne’s aim was to utilize her library to the fullest with her children. As I could relate to the feeling of owning many wonderful books but knowing they were not being used to their maximum capacity I promptly started my own compilation. I was finding in particular the books with several different chapters of saints were being overlooked. The idea was to know what resources we had for any saint, to read on their Feast Days.

For some odd reason I typed our ‘Liturgical Year Resources’ into a Word document. We have been using the document in this form but I have long felt the information contained was capable of far more uses. To this end during the holidays PC and I converted our ‘liturgical year resources’ into a spreadsheet.

Well truthfully I first started on the project by dumping the Word doc into Excel, after 5 slow hours of cutting and pasting into the various columns I was certain than had to be a quicker way, I had only completed January! I finally called upon my own resident Excel genius, PC for help, he completed a month in 5 minutes!!!!!! I had wasted so much time. I was then able to finish formatting the entire spreadsheet in less than an hour! A job that would have taken 60 hours the way I was going. He is simply amazing!!!

PC then became quite keen and involved in the project and added new features. The spreadsheet now contains columns for; Date, saint, resource (book), pages (useful for when there are several saints in the one volume), publisher, key(see below), country, century.
I have designed the key as following:
Picture Book=PB
Long Picture Book=LPB
Mosaic Book= MB
Short Chapter Book=SCB
Children’s Chapter Book= ChB
Teenage Chap Bk=TCB
Adult Chapter Book= ACB
Colouring Book= CB
Short Story for Young Ch. =SYC
Short Story for Middle Ch.=SMC
Short Story for Older Ch.=SOC
Poetry/Verse=PV
Activity Book =AB
Liturgical Resources=LR

The country and century columns still are awaiting information, so if you can recommend any sites which contain this I’ll be most appreciative.

I am so thrilled as with a simple click I can view the; saints for any date, the resources for any saint, all picture books for example, books by publisher, and when the information is entered by century or country.