Using Mac Numbers To Inventory Your Stuff

You can use the Numbers app on your Mac to keep track of things you collect like books. Just create a simple table and put one item on each row. You can then add more data, sort, filter, print and even view your up-to-date list on your iPhone while on the go.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use Numbers to keep track of items that you collect. 
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Numbers is a very versatile spreadsheet program that you can use for a whole variety of different tasks. The one thing that a lot of home owners like to use it for is you just keep track of a library of items. It could be books, or anything else that you collect. So to start with let's create a new Numbers document. I'm just going to use the standard blank template. Now as an example here I'm going to use a list of sample books. These can be books that you collect but it really could be anything that you collect that you want to keep an inventory. So you want to think about which columns we want. For books obviously we want to start with the title for each book. So we'll put Title in the Header field of the first column. In the second column we'll do Author and then we try to think of other bits of information that we would want to record about each item. So for books we may, for instance, have format like paperback, hardcover and so on. Maybe the year of publication so we'll do Year. Now let's start with that. Normally if I do that that's all we're going to record about each item I would get rid of these three columns here. But I have a feeling there's probably going to be more as we build this list. 
We can start by entering the first title. Then to enter data in Numbers if you want to go to the cell to the right then you just use Tab. So I can tab over to the next cell. Then I can enter in the next bit of information. Now to go down to the next row I would press Return. You could see here it's even smart enough to know I want to go back to the beginning of the row. So now I can enter the next title. So let me go and input in a bunch of titles and authors. So there I go. I've got something useful already. I have a list of books and authors and now I can go and add additional information. So maybe I look at some of these books and I label them as paperback. Other ones hardcover. Maybe I have other categories as well. I'll go and fill out the rest of this with some sample data. I'll go and fill in the next column with data, the year of publication or maybe this is the year of the edition that I own. So now I've got a pretty good inventory already of what I've got. 
Now I can adjust the column width depending upon what I need. For instance this title column here, a lot of these you can see wrap onto two of three lines. I can grab the line between two headers here, between A and B, and drag it to the right and if make it just long enough so that it fits the name of my longest book, that's kind of nice but I may just want to settle for it having to be on one or two lines like that. The same thing for author. Here I've got all the authors on one line, well almost all. So let me go and adjust that, maybe get it to about there. Format looks pretty good. It looks like that is about appropriate. But Year is pretty long. It is only going to be these four digits. So I might as well shrink this a little bit like that to save some space so I can see more on the screen at the same time.
There may be other things I want to add as well. For instance I may want to add a Notes field here so I can add some notes about a particular thing, like maybe for this book here, need a better copy or this one here I may want to put that it is Signed. That kind of thing. Just a catch-all column here for additional information. Now sometimes I may lend books to somebody so I may want to have a column called Lending Info. I can put the name of friends that I have lent the book. I may even want to have a Rating Column. Now the ratings, of course, are just going to be my subjective opinions of things but I can them in a variety of different ways. I can give them a letter grade. I can give them a number from one to ten. 
One of the things I can do is go to Format Cell and I can change the formatting here. So far the formatting has been pretty straight forward. It's almost all text except for a number for the year. But for these cells here I can change it to something better. I'm going to double click on the column's letter here and that selects all of the cells in that column except the Header cell. I want to change the format here and set it to Star Rating. This could be a zero to five rating. So I could , say, rate a book like that or like that or like that. This is just a little easier than entering in a number and it's very easy to see which books have high or low ratings. Now if I want to add an additional column I would scroll over to the right and I would drag this out here to add another column. It's going to fill it with what is in here. We're not going to want that. I'm going to change this to an automatic field here, press delete to zero it all out and I could have something else here, like maybe a maybe Last Read Year and put the year that I last read a book. 
Instead if I just want to get rid of a column at the end I could click here, next to the letter, and I get all sorts of options in the Context Menu including Delete Column. I could also easily rearrange columns. It may make sense to have Notes always be the last column. So if I click here where the letter is at the top and then click and drag to the right I can move Notes to the right. That way I can stretch out this column to get a little more room for Notes. Maybe I could shrink the Rating Column. You could see how that gracefully shrinks the actual stars there and makes them not oversized like they were before. It's really easy to move columns around so you shouldn't be afraid to do so. For instance, if you wanted to put the Author first you could drag the author column to the left here and have the author first. Now that is not permanent because I could very easily just drag this column back to the right again. So don't be afraid to reorder things depending upon your needs. All too often I see people very concerned that exactly where things are. In reality it is easy to keep changing things all the time. 
Now you can also move rows around too. So if you want to reorder things you can select a row here and drag that down to reorder the books. You can select one row and then shift click to select a group and then drag the whole group down. So it is very easy to reorder rows here. It is also very easy to enter in new data. You shouldn't have any blank rows at the end of your table. If you do, like that, then you can always grab this little circle with two lines in it at the bottom and drag it up so you have no additional rows. When you want to add a new row just select any cell in that last row there and press return and it inserts a new row ready for you to type in the new information. If you, instead, want to insert a new row at some specific spot you can click in a row here, you can see you also have the controls here for rows just like you had for columns, and you can click there and you can add a row above or below the currently select row. 
Now one of the things you want to do with your list is probably sort it. So, for instance, if you wanted to sort it alphabetically by author then you click here and one of the other options is Sort Ascending or Descending. So I can sort ascending and then I get list by author. You can see it is very useful to have the authors with the last name first just for this kind of sorting. But if I wanted to sort by year I could easily sort by year as well. You can see how easy it is for me to continue to sort things. So I can sort it by year now but I can go back and easily sort by author later. Then if I want to sort by multiple things then I could just basically sort by the secondary thing first. So let's sort by Title and then let's sort by Author and now we could see, for instance, that we get these three books by the same author and the titles are in order. But you could also go to Organize here on the right, click Sort, you can sort the entire table, Add a Column. So I can say sort by author first ascending and then sort by title after that and then Sort Now and I'm going to get exactly the same as what I had before. But now I have an easy way, anytime I make a change or add new books to the end, to Sort Now and then get it sorted in this order. 
Now Filtering is right here and it is also very useful. If I go to Filter I could add a filter here and I can filter based on anyone of these columns. So let's say I just wanted to see my paperbacks. I could say Sort By Format and I could add a rule here, or I could easily just select or deselect something. So I could say, no hardcovers, no trade paperbacks, and see only my paperbacks. You can see this right here. I clicked the little trash can icon and remove that. Let's add another filter by Author and see a list of all the authors. But I could say text and starts with and just the authors that have names that start with B and you could see that's what I get now. So there are lots of different ways to use filters here. You could easily add them and remove them as you want. 
One word of advice though. When you're going to add new rows to your inventory here turn Off Filters and add them then. If you want to go back to Filters you can turn it back On. You can also use categories. So with Categories you can add a category, like for instance format, and you could see here that now groups all the hardcovers together, all the trade paperbacks together and all the paperbacks together. So you get these nice groupings now. That's useful for viewing your inventory as well. It is easy to turn On and Off Categories just like Filters. 
Let's say we want to Print this so we can have a reference we can carry around with us. So we go to File, and then Print and it is going to give you a preview of what you're going to see here. Now you could see it's too wide of a spreadsheet to fit on one piece of paper. But we can adjust the scale here on the right and get is to it all just perfectly fits like that and now you could see it and it goes across two pages here and probably more for a real inventory of books. But chances are you might not want all this information if you're printing. For instance you may not need your rating or lending information or even year so I'm going to select all three of these columns here. Click here and then Hide Selected Columns. It is easy to Hide columns. You can see here A, B, C, and G have these hidden columns. To Reveal Columns you can click on the columns to the left if it and Unhide those columns or you can just go to Table and then Unhide All Columns to bring them back. But the idea here is with Hidden Columns now when I go to Print those columns won't be included so I have more space and I can adjust the scale. Make it a little easier to read.
Now I'm going to give a Title to this table here and I want to call it My Books. I'm going to Save it, something I probably should have done at the very beginning. I'm going to Save it to my Documents folder in iCloud. The reason I want to save it in iCloud is because I want to have access to this list anywhere I go. So I want to be able to pull it up in the Numbers App on my iPhone so that I can check it and, say if I see a book sale I can figure out whether or not I already have a book before I buy a second copy. So I'll call this My Books.Numbers and now one my iPhone if I look in the right place inside of iCloud Drive, in this case in the Documents folder, I'll find that file there. I'll open it up in Numbers on my iPhone. This is always going to stay in sync. So any changes I make while I'm on my iPhone while out I'll see those on my Mac, because it is the same document. The same thing if I change the Document on my Mac I don't have to do anything else to resync it. I'm looking at the same document on my iPhone so I'll see the latest changes I've made. 
So if you've been thinking about using your Mac to keep an inventory of things that you collect, I hope this example of a Numbers spreadsheet to do that is helpful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Using Mac Numbers To Inventory Your Stuff”

Clive Kitchener

11 months ago

Is there a way to import OCR scans from iPhone/iPad? Thinking about large collection of LP's (Vinyl). Far too labor intensive to enter info by typing. Good use of Numbers for me but too much work to manually enter. Thanks!

Clive

Gary Rosenzweig

Clive: Not in Numbers. Maybe there is a third-party app? Or, maybe just take pictures of each LP and put them one session, then put them in a folder. Then sit at your Mac and go through each one using Live Text where you can to enter the names, or just typing as you preview the images.

Kelly

10 months ago

Always enjoy your videos. Thank you.

I have two tips related to your video.

First, if you want to adjust the column width, you can do so easily by double-clicking the column header. You must double-click the column header’s right border.

I accidentally discovered this Numbers feature and have never seen the tip in any guides or documentation.

Imagine you want to expand column A to fit the values in column A. Position your cursor in the column header exactly between column A and column B. The cursor changes allowing you to drag the width of column A. Instead of dragging, double-click. Column A immediately adjusts to fit any values in column A.

The exact behavior of the column fit depends upon the Text Wrap setting. I recommend you play with the feature. Soon you’ll be a master.

The second tip adds to your sorting ideas. Once you have defined a sort rule, you can sort again by clicking the Sort Now button. You showed this in your video.

A hotkey exists too. To sort a select table using a sort rule, use the shortcut command+shirt+R.

Hope these tips help someone, somewhere.

Gene

Another nice video. Thank you.

nick

7 months ago

Hey Gary, I like to create a list of reports and papers that I have stored on my computer as PDF files, much like the list you created here. I was hoping to find a way to format each data entry as a hyperlink to the file that each line refers to, so that when I would click on the cell, the document would open. I see there's an hyperlink format but it does not have a way to link to a local file. Do you know any workaround for this? thx

nick: No good solution for that. You can get a link, but only after you "share" it via iCloud. You don't have to share it with anyone but yourself, but it still takes too much time to do it for a list of files.

Using Mac Numbers To Inventory Your Stuff

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