Reading Tracker Spreadsheet
I posted a video on TikTok a couple of days ago about the spreadsheet I use to track my reading and a few people asked for a copy of it. This morning I've spnt some time cleaning it up and making it a bit more suitable for public presentation, and I figured I'd write this blog post explaining what's going on!
You can find the spreadsheet here. The first thing you'll need to do is go to the File menu and Make A Copy into your own GDrive so that you can actually edit it.
There are four sheets, plus one hidden sheet. I'll talk through what each of them is doing. I've populated them with sample data so you can see what's going on. Obviously you should delete this and add your own books!
Pick A Book
This is the reason I made this sheet in the first place, as a way to manage my TBR and to help me pick my next read when option paralysis took over. This sheet is very simple - it offers you a dropdown list of your various TBRs (pulling from the 'Lists' tab) and selects a book at random for you from that list.
In my version of this spreadsheet I also have some charts and graphs on this page. I haven't included them in the template but making them in Google Sheets is very straightforward.
Book Tracker
The fun bit of the spreadsheet, where you track all of your reading. There are quite a few columns here and they're mostly self explanatory.
The first three are obvious and don't need an explanation. "Series" is also fairly self explanatory. I also use it to track things like awards shortlists. If you don't want the Translator or Series columns you can safely delete them without breaking anything.
Pub Date and Page are also self explanatory. Format is where I track whether I've read it in ebook, paperback, whatever. Again, you can safely delete this if you want - it's not being used in any stats. If you wanted to make a graph with this information that would be very easy to do, though.
The date columns calculate how long it's taken to read each book. Don't edit the "Days Read" column (faintly highlighted in blue) - this will be autopopulated when you fill in the Date Completed column. I use the date format "1 Jan 25" because I like the way it looks.
"End Point" is where I enter the percentage of completion of a book. Most of these will be 100, but for DNFs I like to know how far I got. This will autoupdate the "Pages Read" column based on the page count you entered in column F. The number in the "Page Read" column gets used on the Statistics tab.
I have two rating columns, a 10 star and a 5 star. I enter a numerical rating in the "Rating / 10" column and it autocompletes the 5 star column, rounding down. Why do I have two rating columns? Because Storygraph has half stars (the same as a 10 point scale - I ignore quarter stars) and Goodreads doesn't, and I also log books on both of those platforms because I like redundancy, apparently.
Categories is where you enter your categories, genres, tags, etc. These get pulled through to the Statistics page and you can enter as many as you like. Two of them get used on this sheet; any row with "Favourite" in that column gets highlighted in green, and any with "DNF" in that column is highlighted in red. Yes, it's the British spelling of "Favourite", because I'm British.
Review Link is probably also self explanatory. This is another column you can safely delete if you don't need it.
Statistics
This page is ugly because I don't know how to make Google Sheets look pretty. Sorry. This is doing some basic processing of the data in your reading tracker and generating some stats. I've left some of my specific conditional formatting in place as an example (like highlighting Nonfiction and Translated fiction, because I'm aiming for specific percentages of them in my 2025 reading).
You basically shouldn't edit anything on this page unless you want to change what sorts of things you're tracking (for example, deleting the anthology/nonfiction/translated tracker if you don't care about that stuff). The categories in column G, and their associated counts, are automatically populated based on your entries in the Categories column of the tracker.
Lists
The final visible sheet. This is where your various TBRs live, and is the page the Pick A Book thing is pulling from. It's self explanatory. The book picker only looks at books where the Status (column D) is Unread. When I finish a book I tend to just delete it from this page to keep things as small as possible, but I used to change the status here to Read. Really I should delete this column but that would require rewriting the logic for the book picker and frankly I didn't want to do that.
The Helper Column exists so that you can sort this sheet alphabetically by surname, should you want to.
Data
A hidden column that you should probably leave alone unless you want to start changing the sheet and writing your own logic. It's ugly as hell and is collating lots of information from the tracker sheet that gets used on the statistics sheet. Changing things here may break the spreadsheet in strange ways. Have fun with that.
And that's my reading spreadsheet! Hopefully you'll find it as useful as I have. I'm putting this thing out for free because I hate the culture online of trying to monetise everything, but if you like it enough to want to say thanks you could drop me a tip on Ko-Fi or go and check out one of my roleplaying games.