How to organize essay notes in a spreadsheet

 Spreadsheets are used in a variety of ways. Some people use it for data entry, storage, research purposes, and more. In this article, we are discussing the methods of using a spreadsheet in organizing your essay notes as the methods suggested by the experts. So let’s get it started.

Work on your sections

The first thing you will need to work on is to make your section. If you are organizing your essay notes you will need to have sections like reference list, sources, date and year, tags, keywords, etc. Make the section accordingly and write the title respectively. 

Customizing your sheet

While you will be writing in the sections there will some extremely important, moderately important, and less important sources and points. So you can highlight them according to their importance.

For example- Highlighting a cell for ancient source which you have to include in your essay help. Using Square brackets [] for writing your own idea.

The importance of customizing the sheet is to make it easy for you to read and extract out the information.

Writing dates

You will be writing the dates while taking notes for your essay for different purposes like mentioning the dates of the study, the date on which you took the notes, and many more. So use a single format for writing the dates throughout the sheet. Every country and region have their own standards for writing the dates, some use YYYY-MM-DD while others write like DD-MM-YYYY. So, choose according to your region or your readability and be consistent with it.

Don’t leave empty cells

While writing the notes for yourself or for an analyst you should not leave the cell blank. You should always use a ‘NA’ or a ‘-‘. This will help you or the analyst that the data from the cell is not accidentally missing, it will show that the data is either not available or it is left like this intentionally.

Put only one data in a cell

The cells of your spreadsheet must contain only one piece of data. Don’t enter more than one data in the cell.  You can include a note within the cell but do not add more than one data or put multiple data in a cell. Also, don’t merge the cells. It may look cool but by merging the cells you break the rule of no empty cell.

Make a data dictionary 

It is very helpful to include the entire variables in different files. Make sure it is in the rectangular form so that analysts can use of it in the analysis process. The data dictionary can contain:

• The variable name as in the data and the version we have used.

• The measurement units.

• Expected maximum and minimum values.

Don’t use highlight colour or font as data

You might want to highlight a cell or change the font of a suspicious or important cell. But, you should ignore such things while organizing your data. You can include a separate column with the indicator variable. 

So, now you know the ways that you can organize your essay in a spreadsheet. If you still feel helpless and can’t find a solution. You can always pay someone to do assignment and get the assignment help.