Calling all Spreadsheeters - ATY Community Spreadsheet

[Jody]

Maybe we reading in order crew are bringing the average down. I know I’m not up to that week yet, but I’ve done the medical/legal thriller.

[Jackie, Solstitial Mod]

Well, it could be partially due to those of us going in order and just not being there yet. But I think it's also because it's not exactly an extensive or diverse list. If you like those kinds of books it's probably great, but for me personally it's basically a list of books and authors that I can't stand. So even if I wasn't going in order I probably wouldn't have gotten to it yet. It's definitely the prompt I'm dreading the most. The award committee and I just have extremely different taste in books.

[Jillian]

For me "A Women’s Prize for Fiction winner or nominee" is one of two prompts I dislike. I'm not interested in the books on the list. Of the books I have read on the list, most are meh books. I did just start my book this week though. It is okay but nothing that makes me want to read.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

I've read 3 books from the list this year, but I've assigned them to different prompts each time.. my guess is that it's low on the list and people don't generally like list prompts.

[Hilde]

I love (most) list prompts!
Just haven't gotten to this one yet, have several I want to read that fits though.

[dalex]

I'm surprised people are finding the Women's Prize for Fiction difficult. There are 400ish books to choose from (20 books nominated per year X 20+ years of the prize) and the books cover pretty much every genre - lit fic, historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi. There are a few obscure books on the list but there are also some that are very well-known and well-liked.

Personally, I love the Women's Prize and look forward to the new list each year. Some of my all-time favorite books are noms or winners for the prize.

[Jody]

I love lists, but I’ll admit I’m not overly enthused about this one. There’s certainly some books on there that I want to read, but it doesn’t excite me.

[Elise]

I have an idea for another tab to add to the spreadsheet.

Since it's fun and helpful to see what others are reading or planning to read, how about a dedicated sheet of recommendations for each week? It could follow the same format of each person claiming a column, then filling in the cells with already-read books they know would work for each prompt and would like to recommend to others. That way, it would be easier to find ideas of what to read, rather than having to comb through multiple threads.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Elise wrote: "I have an idea for another tab to add to the spreadsheet.

Since it's fun and helpful to see what others are reading or planning to read, how about a dedicated sheet of recommendations for each wee..."

Like the Plans tab, but with recommendations instead? I like it!

[Elise]

Exactly!

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

It's added! Feel free to contribute!

[Pam]

I love Elises’s idea! I’m already reading books and adding books to my TBR list this year that fit 2019 categories. And, so many I’m finding are quite by accident. Personally, I like the process of finding my own books but a list is always helpful.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Pam wrote: "I love Elises’s idea! I’m already reading books and adding books to my TBR list this year that fit 2019 categories. And, so many I’m finding are quite by accident. Personally, I like the process of..."

I do too! But I find I'm more likely to pick it up if I see it recommended, so when I'm looking at lists, if I see it on this tab, I'll probably feel more inclined to actually read it.

Plus, there are some books that are so perfect for certain prompts (or fill them in a unique way) and I'm glad to have an outlet to share it!

[Pam]

Thanks Emily! I was just thinking this morning that I wish there was a place to recommend books for prompts, in addition to seeing books members are reading. And now there is a place!

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Thank Elise for suggesting it!

[Joan]

I finally added my plan to the spreadsheet!

[Perri]

Down to my last three: Medical/legal thriller, On/Below Water and Alternate History.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Congrats Perri! That's an accomplishment! I'm still about 10 books out from completing mine (and I'm reading Middlemarch via Serial Reader, so I won't really be done until December).

[Rachelnyc]

Perri, I'm down to my last three as well! I've started The Night Circus for Goodreads Book of the Month and then I have the air element and the Clue weapon.

Emily, I hope you're enjoying Middlemarch! It's a doorstop but enjoyed it much more than I expected to (it was my intimidating read book)!

[Pam]

I'm getting close to finishing, too! Down to my last 5 with 3 started, one of which, Lonesome Dove, is 858 pages! It feels good to see the end in sight. We are almost there...

[Perri]

Ooooh Rachel, how I loved Night Circus! Pam, Lonesome Dove broke my heart :`(

[Tracy]

Emily, I need spreadsheet help!! I went in and updated my books, but I needed to move one book choice to a different prompt and I tried to cut and paste it. Now no matter what I do its not centering :-(

Is there a way to fix it? I can't figure it out. I didn't want to play with the text wrap and such because I don't want to throw off everyone elses entries.

Its the prompt : A Book about a Murder

Hoping I just screwed up that one entry and not all of your hard work :-(

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Fixed! :)

In the toolbar, there's an icon that looks like |--|> and you just have to change it so the text wraps around instead of going outside of the box! It happens when you cut something out of a box... that box then reverts to the original formatting.

No worries! Easy fix!

[Tracy]

Emily wrote: "Fixed! :)

In the toolbar, there's an icon that looks like |--|> and you just have to change it so the text wraps around instead of going outside of the box! It happens when you cut something out o..."

Thank you :-)

[Steve]

In case anyone is making their own spreadsheet of 2019 plans, here's a sheet function you can use to load the list from the community spreadsheet:

=importrange("1WvpKm3RKx96igCQWl0dMbTBjj7ZgYJUO3m8jcdD6_FA","2019 Plans!B4:B55")

It'll update it automatically when anything is added to that range on that ATY community spreadsheet (like literally automatically...I just did a test on the community sheet and it was already in my personal spreadsheet by time I switched tabs).

Obviously, you can copy and paste, but this way you can work on it now and not have to keep going back to copy it again anytime a new result gets added. Now, you just load in this function and let Emily do the work for you! :-P

We just have to remember not to rename the tab from "2019 plans"...

EDIT: Crud...that did not work because it cut the URL... So, go to the ATY spreadsheet, copy that URL, and then paste it, in the function; make sure the URL is surrounded by quotes...and that there's a comma before the "2019 plans!B4:B55" part.

EDIT 2: Okay...this is better. All you have to do now is delete the space I put in between the spreadsheets/ and the d/ that follows.

EDIT 3: Found a way for it to work without the URL! So much easier.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

...And they call me the spreadsheet master. Thanks for this, Steve!

I plan on leaving 2019 Plans named as is, but I will rearrange the prompts once we have the final order of the list from the mods. Will that affect people's personal planning sheets? I can just leave it in the order it is now, but I feel like it would be more useful matched up with the final list.

[Steve]

Emily wrote: "...And they call me the spreadsheet master. Thanks for this, Steve!

I plan on leaving 2019 Plans named as is, but I will rearrange the prompts once we have the final order of the list from the mo..."

That's a good point. Didn't consider the later rearrangement. Yes... that'll affect it since a personal spreadsheet's column A (let's say) would rearrange, but the column B where I put my future plans wouldn't rearrange since it's static to my spreadsheet.

I think there are a few possible work arounds or suggestions...

One is to load your personal plans to the community spreadsheet before they're rearranged. Then, put the same function into your personal spreadsheet but replace B4:B55 with whatever column you're using in the community spreadsheet.

Or manually rearrange your 52 books on your own spreadsheet once the prompts are rearranged.

Or, before the prompts are rearranged, paste them onto your spreadsheet (presuming you don't care that your personal order doesn't sync with the community order).

[Pam]

My total shows 52 but I only have 51. Can someone fix this for me please? I had a book in the prompt that’s left but had deleted it weeks ago. I think that’s what triggered the error.

[Elise]

Pam, I selected your empty square and hit the delete key. That cleared it. Maybe there was a space hiding in there that made the spreadsheet count it as completed.

[Pam]

Thanks Elise! I didn’t think to do that. I figured it hadn’t cleared for some reason. One lonely prompt left.

[dalex]

Steve wrote: "In case anyone is making their own spreadsheet of 2019 plans, here's a sheet function you can use to load the list from the community spreadsheet."

This is so cool! Thanks Steve.

[Sarah]

Ha- this is cool! I also love that the prompt with the least complete percentage is "A book that intimidates/scares you." Here I was thinking I was all alone saving it for last.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

I'm thinking that once the new threads for 2019 open up, I'm going to delete all of the tabs except the 2019 tracking tab. Everyone will be able to move their planning lists to a thread that they've created on here, and we will have the prompt threads for recommendations. I may also leave the 2019 Rejects tab but change it from planning to completion, so that people have a place to track their books on there as well.

Thoughts? I don't want to make such big changes without input from everyone.

[Chrissy]

I really like being able to scroll quickly through ideas for lots of prompts in one place to get ideas, so I'd miss the planning and recommendation tabs, but understand why you'd want to get rid of them.

ETA: Looking at the 2019 planning tab, it is getting kind of unwieldy because of the number of ideas people are adding so that rows or columns end up really big. That makes me less interested in perusing it than I would be if I knew I was looking at just what people were most excited about for each category.

[Sophie]

Emily, I was about to add a book to my 2018 reject challenge on my phone when the app crashed and now I can’t find the tab! 😱 I hope I haven’t erase it by mistake 🙏🏻

[Steve]

Sophie wrote: "Emily, I was about to add a book to my 2018 reject challenge on my phone when the app crashed and now I can’t find the tab! 😱 I hope I haven’t erase it by mistake 🙏🏻"

Yes, it's missing. Emily, are you able to do a "restore this version" in the revision history? I can't, so maybe there's a limitation that only a sheet owner can use that functionality.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

I had this same problem a while back. It looked like the 2018 Rejects tab disappeared, but in all of the saved versions, it's still there! I think someone had just accidentally hidden it... can y'all see it now?

[Steve]

Emily wrote: "I had this same problem a while back. It looked like the 2018 Rejects tab disappeared, but in all of the saved versions, it's still there! I think someone had just accidentally hidden it... can y'a..."

Yup, it's there!

[Sophie]

Thank you!

[Lizzy]

I'm a little surprised that there are no prompts that have reached 100%. The first one of the year (the ATY title) is at 91%, but that's as close as we've gotten.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Lizzy wrote: "I'm a little surprised that there are no prompts that have reached 100%. The first one of the year (the ATY title) is at 91%, but that's as close as we've gotten."

We have a few people who haven't updated their list in ages. I've been culling the ones who have been stuck at 1 or 2 for a long time, but I haven't been paying enough attention to how long each person is stalled at.

[Sabrina]

idk if anyone else is having this problem but some of the prompt rows are so large that I can't see the text in it on my screen, but if you scroll down it skips to the next row

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Are you on the Plans tab? That’s a problem because some people (myself included, add so many books that it makes the boxes pretty large.

[Tracy]

Sabrina wrote: "idk if anyone else is having this problem but some of the prompt rows are so large that I can't see the text in it on my screen, but if you scroll down it skips to the next row"

Yup. If you click on your box to highlight it, it will give you a scroll bar so you can scroll through all of your planned books ( in that particular box). Took me a while to figure that out. I suck at spreadsheets.

[Sabrina]

Emily wrote: "Are you on the Plans tab? That’s a problem because some people (myself included, add so many books that it makes the boxes pretty large."

ah. then i am part of the problem lol

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

Haha Sabrina! Now that I moved my plans over to a thread here, I’m going to go and delete some of the book from the list to make it a more manageable size. Or shrink the font size down so that my boxes aren’t so big to be annoying. Hopefully that will help a bit!

[Tracy]

I got completely overwhelmed looking at rejects prompts on the spreadsheet last night so I'm going to try and tackle them today.

I had 86...86!!!!!!!!!!! "maybes" on there ( although I think some of those were eventually voted in or are very similar, so can be crossed off).

Its going to be hard to choose, but I'm sure it will get smaller as the other challenge lists for the year come out. I've decided to keep as many as I want and then use them as mood reads if I have extra time. I'm not going to put a goal on it. If I do it will be maybe 5 or 10 at most.

My 2019 list is tentatively finalized now so I can go back in and shorten up a few of my list ideas as well. I think my longest one was " an author with more than one book on your TBR", but I narrowed that down quickly yesterday when I pulled most of them off because I already had a book planned for the challenge by about half of them and I was trying not to repeat authors. I also tried to stick with mostly books that I own in physical copy or on my kindle this year so I don't drive the library crazy again with a million ILL's.

[Emily, Conterminous Mod]

I removed the ones that were voted in (I think!) so there shouldn't be any duplicates... but there are quite a few that are similar that I left on there.

[Ann]

My book club group chose 12 rejects...one a month. At this point I am going to stick with that.

[Tracy]

Emily wrote: "I removed the ones that were voted in (I think!) so there shouldn't be any duplicates... but there are quite a few that are similar that I left on there."

Haha...I thought you had done that. Looks like I have a lot of weeding to do 😩