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Unbroken's avatar

How to makes quotes more accessible?

Asked by Unbroken (10537 points ) November 18th, 2012

I love quotes, when upset bothered or incapable of expressing myself I look quotes up, reading or watching a movie I jot quotes down that hit me particulary, when battling something I use quotes as tools.

The problem I have is they are everywhere. I can never find the one I want, I have files on my laptop saved in my email, posted on fb and pinterest and on various quote sites, in a file and notebooks and memo pads and books, on post it notes etc.

What is the best way to bring order to chaos? Any ideas for displays? How about making something durable that I can add more to? Should I file according to author or topic key words? Is this why the dewey decimal system is so counterintuitive?

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9 Answers

gailcalled's avatar

Since trying to remember an author is as difficult as remembering a specific quote, I vote for categorizing by subject matter.

Life, death, Twinkies, Woody Allen, exercise, clothing, etc.

marinelife's avatar

A database of quotes with fields for author, subject and key words would be the way to go.

wundayatta's avatar

Sort and categorize. There are many types of software that help you do this. If you know any databases, I would start there. There are traditional databases and then there are the kind used to sort through free form data. Whatever you do, it’s going to be a lot of work, I’m afraid. I think the simplest thing would be to store them in one Word document and you can just search through them for keywords. Of course, if there get to be a lot of them, that become less and less wieldy. Then you have to start categorizing them.

ETpro's avatar

I keep mine in an Excel file. I can sort it by author, subject category or actual text if I happen to remember exactly how it starts.

Seiryuu's avatar

While I don’t archive quotes, if it were up to me I’d use OneNote (which is available in the simplest Microsoft Office suite). You can copypasta your quotes into it and collapse them as well. Best part is that the search function is really good.

Unbroken's avatar

Fha @gailcalled not sure how I would fill the twinkie category but I am all for it.

Thank you for the advice. I am pondering all your ideas.

@marinelife the database would be nice, because then I could potentially share it, sure a lot of them exist but mine would have the best. : P

As far as the different programs I already have Microsoft on here so I might go with that. But Excel does sound tempting if you can really sort it multiple ways.

ETpro's avatar

@rosehips Make the first row a header row with names indicating what’s in each column. To sort, select the entire spreadsheet, click search, make sure the “My data has headers” checkbox is ticked on, then specify which column to search first, second, third and so on by. The only downside is it functions on exact matches. There’s no algorithm to compensate for poor spelling or draw syntactic inferences form the search terms entered.

Unbroken's avatar

Thanks ET

blueiiznh's avatar

When in Windows I just make sure I index the file types that you store them as. Then, click Start and type some key words in the search programs and files window.

Windows 7 Indexing

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