The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock with the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I quickly and easily create hyperlinked cells in the mobile version of Google Sheets using the iOS Mail app. I'm aware that this is a niche issue, but I use this hack all the time, so I thought I'd share the trick I use.  Here's the thing.  It's super easy to create a hyperlinked cell in Google Sheets from a computer.  While on the cell you want to link, just hit Command + K on a Mac and Control + K on a PC, paste in the URL and hit apply and you've got a nice hyperlinked cell that brings up a link to the website when you click on or hover over the cell. The problem is that it's more involved for the mobile version of Google Sheets.  In fact, it really requires you to write a somewhat complicated formula that involves too much cutting and pasting and quote marks for my taste.  SO, here's my trick.  Before I show you this, you should know that somet...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you why I keep a spreadsheet for batteries and light bulbs.  I used to be terrible about changing out lightbulbs that burnt out in my house.  I’d have to haul out the ladder and, let’s be honest, chances are, I’d probably not have the right bulb in stock. So, I’m going get all the way up on the ladder, unscrew the fixture and find that i don’t have that particular bulb on hand.  So, then I either have to screw the fixture back in, put the ladder away, and wait until I go shopping to get the right bulb, OR the more likely option is that I’d just leave the whole thing undone with the ladder there for a week or two before I get the right bulb. Well, NO MORE.  NOW I have a light bulb spreadsheet.  I started this spreadsheet the day I had to change out something like 7 light bulbs — which shows you how I procrastinate!  I brought out my stock of lightbul...

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 ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share my super quick tip on getting rid of blank lines in a text document on an iPad or PC.  Have you ever cut and pasted something into an email or an Evernote memo or even a Pages document on your iPad and found that it was formatted with blank lines between each bullet or each line?  Sometimes it is easy to go in and delete each blank line, but sometimes you are pasting in hundreds of lines and that process would take you forever.  On my PC, my go-to fix for this was to paste the whole mess into Word and use Find and Replace to find to two paragraph returns together and replace them with just one paragraph return. You had to go into special characters in order to make it happen, but it would do the trick. On the iPad, the Pages app doesn’t have this option, so here’s my solution.  Select and copy the whole passage.  Then paste this into a new spreadsheet ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you how I use Google Sheets to organize my citations and sources for papers and research projects. I'm in my first year of graduate school and we do a lot of writing.  References and citations are very important, as they are for any discipline.  I supposed if I was writing a dissertation with a hundred citations, I would feel the need to pay for and learn a whole complicated citation software, but since I'm not, I prefer to use tools that I already use and know well.  AND despite the fact I'm not writing a dissertation, I have written some papers that have had over 25 sources, so I do need SOME kind of system to organize and manage my citations.   I started out, as most people do, with kind of a hodge-podge system of just cutting and pasting URLs from the Internet and sticking them at the bottom of the Word document of the paper.  Or, if I'm doing r...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I use Google Sheets and Toodledo to throw our annual party with a minimum of fuss. I used to feel kind of intimidated about throwing a big party, but now I’ve got it down to a science.  We throw a big annual night-club themed dance party since we both love to dance and we’re too old and suburban now to go to actual night clubs.  Our party is NOT going to end up in a magazine spread, but it is easy to pull off year after year.  And I find that I can actually enjoy myself when I'm not being a slave to perfection.  Here are some of my requirements for our annual party: Large  - I actually prefer large parties since I get stressed out about narrowing down the guest list for smaller parties.  I will definitely enjoy the party less if I’m worried about hurting people’s feelings. Easy  - Hats off to people who seem to effortlessly throw bea...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share some of my tips for getting organized over the holidays using Google Sheets and Toodledo.  I love the holidays, but like everyone else, I frequently feel overwhelmed by all of the additional tasks during holiday season — decorating the house and tree, ordering and sending holiday cards, and buying and wrapping Christmas presents.  All this amid lots of late-night seasonal festivities and, for us, holiday travel.  My very first order of business is that I cut myself some major slack around the holidays. I would highly recommend doing an analysis of what is critical to you and what is not and then prioritizing accordingly. For example, weekends are hectic for us at this time of year — my husband travels, my kids have a bunch of activities.  It was getting increasingly difficult to plan enough time on a weekend for all of us to go out, get a tree, put it up, and...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I take all of the passages that I've highlighted in a Kindle book and either stick them in Evernote or format them for Google Sheets. It probably won't surprise you, based on my penchant for paperless everything, that I prefer to read books on the Kindle.  I still miss some things about physical books, but for me, the benefits of reading on a Kindle far outweigh them.  In particular, I like the search function and the highlight function.  Since I do most of my reading in bed, I really like not having to wrestle with a highlighting pen and a heavy book while reclining.  You might have noticed, if you highlight like I do, that even when you are on the Kindle app for iPad, you can't just copy and paste passages of a book that you want to share. Probably for copyright reasons.   That said, what Amazon DOES have is a unique website for you that compil...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18Pmy-IRLsNcuNJFlXR-jufWQWKdWbMIyOfHZ94GQwCA/edit#gid=1764793085 Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll give you access to the spreadsheet that I use to share expenses with friends and family.  And show you how I use it.  You don't need a spreadsheet for a dinner out with friends, right?  It's just meal total divided by the number of people -- you can easily do that with a simple calculation. But what if you've gone away for a weekend with friends or are traveling with family?  Or if you've decided to throw and party and are splitting the expenses with a group of friends.  And what if different people have paid for different things and not everyone participated in every activity?  Then it starts to get complicated, right?  So, I can't take total credit for this spreadsheet. I found it online and modified it.  But let me share with you how I u...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Notability and Google Sheets for paperless packing lists. I'm always amazed at people who don't use packing lists.  I would forget at a minimum 10% of the stuff I needed to bring, which would be inconvenient in the extreme.  Even if I don't use a packing list to aid while packing, for shorter trips for example, I always use one as a check afterwards to make sure I remembered everything.   I know that there are a billion apps out there specifically designed to create packing lists -- and I've tried out a bunch of them.  But for whatever reason, I really prefer having all of my packing items on a single "piece of paper" and marking them off one by one.  I don't like having things organized by someone else's categories or the effort required to change those categories.  I want to be able to sort my list in a way that makes packing...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share a couple of systems that I use to find things in my house!  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   In almost every household, there is one "finder."  Something is lost?  Call in the Finder.  From my extremely informal polling, I've found that the Finder tends to be the woman of the house, but that is not true in mine!  My husband is definitely the Finder. He is frequently tasked with finding shoes, tennis racquets, mobile devices, stuff in the fridge and in one embarrassing incident, the keys that I was searching high and low for -- sneakily located in my right hand.   When I started staying at home with the kids over a decade ago, I found myself calling him multiple times a day to ask where things were.  I quickly found that to be an unsust...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll share the apps and systems that I use for paperless note-taking.  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   I'm not sure what initially drove me to be semi-paperless in my personal life. It was probably a combination of being overwhelmed by all of the paper streaming into my home, wanting to have access to my files where ever I was, and the giant technological advances that made it not just doable, but also pretty appealing. Whatever it was, once I got my iPad, I stopped relying on paper. Evernote My primary note taking app is Evernote. It is cross platform, which is a recurring theme and a priority to me. It means that I can access it from my iPhone, iPad, any web browser, or Windows software on my computer. It started out with rudimentary functionality, particularly the mobile...