The spreadsheet was the right decision. It let somebody start cataloguing on a Tuesday afternoon without asking anyone for a budget, and for a few hundred books it does the job.
Then it stops. Usually at one of four specific moments.
The four things that break
Two people need it at once. A shared spreadsheet with two people editing is a spreadsheet with a
copy called library-final-v2-USE-THIS.xlsx in somebody’s downloads folder.
Lending needs a second sheet. So now there is a catalogue tab and a loans tab, and no honest way to ask which books are out right now. People write the borrower’s name in a cell next to the book and delete it on return, which works until somebody forgets.
You cannot tell what you have. Four copies of the same title become four rows, or one row with “x4” in a note, and neither survives a stocktake.
Nobody else can search it. The whole point of a catalogue is that a reader can find a book without asking you. A spreadsheet on your laptop cannot do that.
If none of those have happened yet, stay where you are. Genuinely. A library system you do not need is worse than a spreadsheet that works.
Before you export anything, fix the columns
Whatever system you move to will read your spreadsheet better if you spend twenty minutes tidying it first. This is worth more than any other preparation.
Give every column a plain header in the first row: Title, Author, ISBN, Category, Copies. Delete the decorative header rows above it, the merged cells, and the colour coding that meant something to whoever left. Put one book per row.
Most importantly, find your ISBN column and clean it. If ISBNs are there, your import will pull real covers, subjects and publisher descriptions for every row that has one, and your catalogue will arrive looking finished rather than like a spreadsheet with a new coat of paint. If a cell has an ISBN plus a note, split it. If the column has been formatted as a number and lost its leading zero, format it as text.
Export as CSV, not as Excel
Save a copy as CSV, in UTF-8 if your spreadsheet offers the choice. Most import tools read CSV;
fewer read .xlsx reliably, and none of them read your formatting.
Keep the original file. Do not move it, do not tidy it, do not delete it after the import “worked”. Keep it for a year.
Import, then check three things
Run the import, then check these before you tell anyone the library has moved.
Count the rows. If your spreadsheet had 812 books and the system says 807, find the five. They are usually rows with no title, or duplicates the importer merged, and both are fine once you have looked.
Search for a book you know is awkward. Something with an accent in the author’s name, or a title starting with “The”, or a local publication with no ISBN. See how it landed.
Look at what came back from the ISBNs. Covers, subjects and descriptions should have appeared for most rows. If they did not, the ISBN column probably needs another pass.
Keep the parts that were working
The spreadsheet had things the system will not, and it is worth naming them so you deliberately recreate them rather than quietly losing them.
If you kept a “requested by” column, that becomes a book requests feature in most systems. If you tracked donations, that may become a note or a category. If you had a colour for “damaged”, that becomes a condition flag.
Write these down before you import, because two weeks later nobody remembers what the yellow rows meant.
What you get that the spreadsheet could not give you
Two people at the desk at once. A record of who has what, without a second tab. A catalogue readers can search from their own phones. A stocktake that takes an afternoon instead of a week.
And the thing people are most surprised by: books start moving. Not because the software is clever, but because a catalogue somebody can actually browse is the first time most of the collection has been visible to the people it was bought for.
BeeShelf is a library system for schools, NGOs and small libraries. Start free, or read the other articles.