Tools: Keywords Spreadsheet Template

This is a simple thing I made this morning, but since I wish I had done it earlier in grad school, I’m posting it here in case it’s useful to anyone else (again, particularly if you’re just getting started). It’s just a spreadsheet for saving definitions of keywords along with their citation information. Make it once, dump stuff into it over time, and it (hopefully) becomes more useful the more you use it.

To use it, save this template file to your computer, and replace the sample entries with your own. Don’t worry about trying to dump every keyword in your brain on here—just keep the file around, and when you come across a keyword definition that you think will be useful, copy and paste the info into the sheet.

Ideally, over time, this will become a useful repository in three ways:

Instead of digging through class notes or flipping/scrolling/swiping through a book, you can open your Keywords file and look through the list for the definition you need.
You can see how definitions and concepts have changed over time. Ideally, you’ll accumulate multiple definitions for the same term. By sorting alphabetically and then by year, a rough history may start to become apparent.
You can identify what terms and concepts you gravitate towards, and how they relate to one another.

To be clear, the usefulness I describe above is all hypothetical—I just made this file this morning. But I see it as helping fill a larger need I have, which is to get a better sense of how the ideas and concepts that I am most interested in have developed over time. I imagine that that sense will improve over time through reading, research, and practice, but as I am not one to trust my brain to remember stuff unaided, I figure it doesn’t hurt to set up some simple buckets for catching stuff. Having just completed my coursework, I can say that similar such buckets (like Zotero, which I’ve used for three years now) can be quite useful, and their usefulness tends to increase over time.

If you use Zotero’s citation marker feature:

If you use Zotero’s citation marker feature, and don’t mind getting a little fussy with Excel, then you may want to use this version of the Keywords spreadsheet template. It is more complicated than the version further above because I customized it to my specific writing workflow, which includes using Zotero’s citation markers feature. I wanted to be able to copy and paste the citation marker with the specific page numbers from the worksheet directly into my draft. I also included a data validation step to help avoid duplicating bibliographic information incorrectly.

Keywords template, with Zotero citation marker columns and Bibliography tab.

Using this version of the template, follow this procedure when saving a new quote:

In the Bibliography tab, in the “Citation - Chicago 16th Ed. Notes Bibliography” column, enter the full citation for your source. (It can be in whatever format you choose. I just named the column by the format I preferred for this use.)
In Zotero, create a citation marker for your source.
In Excel, in the Bibliography tab, under the “Citation Marker” column, paste the citation marker next to the full citation you’ve entered.
In the Keywords tab, enter your new record’s info (i.e. the Keyword, Year, Author Last, Quote, and Page info).
In your new record, click on the cell under the “Citation” column. A dropdown arrow appears on the right of the cell.
Click on the dropdown arrow and select your source from the list. The “Citation Marker” cell will automatically populate with the citation marker you pasted.
Copy the contents of the “Citation Marker” cell.
Right-Click on the “Citation Marker Exact” cell. Select “Paste Special,” and select “Values.”
Enter the page number between the vertical lines to the right of the author name.

Going forward, rather than having to create the citation marker in Zotero whenever you want to use this quote, you can just copy the contents of the “Citation Marker Exact” cell and paste it into the document.