Organizing Reading Notes and Highlights for Grad School with Google Sheets

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my method of organizing my notes and highlights from the assigned reading for graduate school using Google Sheets.

I'm in a grad school program and there is a lot of assigned reading.  Since I now rent my textbooks, marking them all up with highlights and notes isn't really an option.  I suppose I COULD rewrite each passage that I would have highlighted in a notebook or something, but despite the fact that it probably would help my memory retention, it would take FOREVER and seems like busy work.  So, I've taken to renting my textbook digitally when at all possible.  That way I can highlight passages in the digital textbook and then export them, so that I'll have those highlights forever -- even after I return the textbook.

So, let me start by telling you how I organize these notes and then I'll go into how I export them.  First,

Organizing

I think in table format and kind of always have.  That means that I have a special place in my heart for spreadsheets.  I like to be able to re-sort a table by various columns and I'm partial to the versatility of the multiple tabs that are usually found in spreadsheets.  So, for each class where there is reading notes and highlights, I create a new spreadsheet called something like "<Class Name> Reading and Highlights."  For example, here is the spreadsheet for my Social Work Practice class.  Then, I create a tab for each week of the class with the most recent being on the far left.  Since there are 16 weeks of this class, eventually, I'll have 16 tabs across the bottom.  You can organize this however you want.  Another way would be to create a tab for each textbook -- I have three in this class plus 2 PDF articles, so then there would be five tabs.  Finally, I create a tab to the far left, which is the first one you see when the spreadsheet is opened, which I call Working.  This is the sheet where I manipulate the data and get it into the right format before pasting it into the appropriate tab.  So, you can see as I go through this that I have highlighted passages and notes for each week so far.  You can also see that the highlights have some additional information in other columns like page number and section of the book.  So, now let me show you how I export this info and manipulate it.

Export from Kindle

I tend to get my digital textbook rentals from Amazon, so I'm reading and highlighting within the Kindle app.  I have a video on exporting highlights from a Kindle, but I've been using a slightly different approach with textbooks, which I will show you here.  I do this from the Kindle app on my iPad, but you could also do this from your Phone app. 

• Hit the button up here to see the notebook with all of your highlights in it. 
• Then hit the Share button to Export and choose Email. 
• Then send this email to yourself.  You can filter what you see in your notebook by hitting this filter button over here, but it doesn't affect what gets exported.  The export always contains all of your notes and highlights regardless of what filter is applied.
• Now go check your email and open this attached file.

What you get is this nice html document.  Since this has all of the highlights from the textbook, you'll need to find the highlights that pertain to the chapter you just read and select them.  It helps that they are in order by page number rather than the more baffling location number.  Plus, this document also sorts the highlights by chapter.  So, if I'm looking for the highlights from Chapter 2, I just scroll down and here they are.  Okay -- so I'm going to go ahead and select all of these (pause).  Now hit Copy.  

Now, I'll open my reading spreadsheet and paste all of this into the Working tab.  Okay -- it looks like a bit of a mess now.  Let's tidy it up and organize it.  I want each highlight on a single line with the page number and section in a different column on that line.  In order to do this, I'll select from the second line all the way down, copy that, and then paste it right next to this first cell.  Okay -- now I need to get rid of the duplicate lines, so I sort this column alphabetically, and delete anything that doesn't start with "Highlight."  That gets rid of all of the duplicates.  Okay -- to further tidy this up, I want to delete the phrase "Highlight(yellow) - .  So I go into Find and Replace and paste in that phrase, choosing to replace it with nothing.  Now when I choose Replace All, all of those phrases go away.  Getting better!  The last thing is that I would really like to be able to sort these highlights by page number if they get out of order.  This means that I have to split this column so that the section title appears in one column and the page number appears in another.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to do this on the iPad, so I move over to my PC version of Google Sheets and open this spreadsheet in Chrome.

First I insert another column here that I want the page number to ultimately move into.  Now I select this column and choose Data, then Split Text into Columns . . .  It tries to automatically detect what character you want to use to trigger the column split, but it never gets it right in this case, so we have to tell it.  So, down here, select Custom, then type in greater than sign and a space and VOILA.  Columns are split!  Now this isn't precisely the order I want my data to appear in, so I can drag the columns around to my liking.  Once I've got it set, I select all of this, cut it and paste it into the correct weekly tab.  I may also add another column to specify the textbook these came from.  I do this for each chapter I read for the week.  So, what if you have highlights from different formats than a Kindle book?  I've got a couple of tips for that:

• PDF - If you are reading an article in PDF format, I have a video on extracting highlights from a PDF using the Goodreader app.  
• Physical Textbook - If you are reading a hard copy textbook, you can retype the passages that you want to keep, but you can also dictate them, which I find to be faster.  I use Google Keep to dictate into and then paste the passage into Google Spreadsheet.  If you attempt to dictate directly into a Google Spreadsheet cell, it doesn't tend to work out well.  

You may think this kind of chops up your data and makes it hard to search.  That may be true, and you are welcome to consolidate the tabs into one or, as I suggested earlier, by textbook, but I have found that Google Spreadsheet's search mechanism makes this unproblematic.  If you choose Search, which I do by hitting the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F, you can search the whole spreadsheet. By default, it only searches the current sheet, but if you hit these three dots, you get more options.  I'm going to search for the key word "collaboration" and hit these 3 dots.  As soon as you hit those dots, it switches to searching all sheets.  You can see that Search found instances of the word "collaboration" in three different tabs: Weeks 5, 4, and 1.  I find that the search ability is so robust that you don't really need to have all of your highlights on one tab.  Now you can easily find passages, quote from them, or review to your heart's content.

So, let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!