Here is the quiet thing nobody tells you about being a reader: you forget. You finish The Housemaid at one in the morning, swear you will remember every twist, and a season later all you can recall is that you stayed up too late. Book Tracker is one workbook that holds the year you actually read — the titles, the lines you loved, the hours you spent — so your reading life stops blurring into a fog. It works in Excel and Google Sheets alike, and unlike a reading app, the file is yours: no account, no subscription, no internet required.
A dashboard that counts your reading year for you
Open the Dashboard and the year is laid out for you. It counts the books you’ve tracked, completed, and are currently reading; the pages you’ve turned; how many books you own and what your shelf is worth; your top books by your own score and by their average critic score; a breakdown of where every book sits — want-to-read, reading, completed, on hold; and this week’s and this month’s reading minutes against a goal you set. You never do the counting. Type a book on another tab and every number here updates itself.
One row per book — rated five ways
The Books tab is the shelf. Each row asks for the title, author, series, genre, format, status, and pages, and then it asks you to rate the book across five lanes — Overall, Story, Characters, World, and Style — while it is still loud in your head. Rating five things instead of one is the difference between “I gave it four stars” and remembering why, and the workbook averages the five into your own My Score. It also pulls in the average critic score for each title, so your taste and the crowd’s sit side by side.
The lines worth keeping, and what the critics thought
February arrives with a passage you cannot stop rereading. You move it to the Quotes tab — the book, the line, who said it, the page — and rate the line out of ten, so the sentence lives somewhere other than a dog-eared page. On the Critic Ratings tab you log scores from Goodreads, The StoryGraph, Kirkus, and more; the workbook computes a percent so scores from different sites compare cleanly, and feeds the average back to your Books tab.
A reading habit you can see
By summer it has become a habit. You sit down with a book, set a timer, and log the session on the Reading Journal — date, book, minutes, a note for the hour. The Dashboard turns those minutes into this-week and this-month progress against your weekly and monthly goals, and tells you, plainly, whether your pace is holding.
Works in Excel and Google Sheets — and it’s yours
Prefer Google Sheets? You don’t have to import anything. The bundle includes a link to a ready-made native copy: open it, click Make a copy, and it lands in your Drive fully set up — every dropdown, color, and live count already working. Prefer Excel or LibreOffice? The .xlsx works there natively. The difference between this and a reading app is that nothing here is borrowed. The file is yours, the data is yours, and it will still open in ten years.
What you get
A six-tab workbook (Read Me, Dashboard, Books, Quotes, Critic Ratings, Reading Journal), a one-click Google Sheets copy, and three PDF guides — a Start Here guide, a Reading Tracker Playbook, and a Printable Reading Log for pen-and-paper days. Instant download; updates are free.
The example library inside the workbook — every title, author, rating, quote, and critic score — is fictional, written only to show the workbook in use. Book Tracker is a personal reading log, not professional or purchasing advice.
Want to try it first? The free Book Tracker starter is a one-tab taste of the full workbook.
