Easy tool for coding/tagging/grouping items?
June 6, 2018 3:26 PM Subscribe
I have a set of ~300 projects in an Excel doc. Each project has a title cell, and a description cell with a couple sentences in it. I'm supposed to tag/code each of these projects to establish what the universe of topics is, so that we can eventually group similar projects together for various communications purposes. Is there a better way to do this than Excel?
Each project may have 5-6 categories/topics-- for example, a project may be on the health impacts of providing food assistance to low-income mothers when they pick their kids up from school, which would be tagged for health, food, low-income, kids, education, and mothers, and possibly a few others (SNAP, Medicaid) based on how it's funded.
Right now I'm just adding all my tags to an adjacent cell (one cell per project), but I think it will be somewhat unusable and inflexible later. Ideally I'd like a really simple interface that lets me tag these projects, then later lets me group/filter by the tags. It feels like the scope of the project is too small for most database solutions, or say making a Wordpress instance. How would you tackle this assignment?
Thank you!
Each project may have 5-6 categories/topics-- for example, a project may be on the health impacts of providing food assistance to low-income mothers when they pick their kids up from school, which would be tagged for health, food, low-income, kids, education, and mothers, and possibly a few others (SNAP, Medicaid) based on how it's funded.
Right now I'm just adding all my tags to an adjacent cell (one cell per project), but I think it will be somewhat unusable and inflexible later. Ideally I'd like a really simple interface that lets me tag these projects, then later lets me group/filter by the tags. It feels like the scope of the project is too small for most database solutions, or say making a Wordpress instance. How would you tackle this assignment?
Thank you!
In addition to that idea, you could also group and combine tags into categories if appropriate - e.g. an income column that could be "low", "medium", blank etc. as appropriate rather than having a series of columns for each potential income tag. That could keep the spreadsheet more plausibly sized.
But this isn't ideal Excel territory. If you use one cell per tag instead of one cell with a bunch of tags, then you can at least more easily do searches; if tags are in columns J-P and the data starts in row 5, you could enter text in say cell Q2 to T2 (freeze rows) and use =COUNTIF($J5:$P5, $Q$2:$T$2) in a cell in the first row, say R5 to find the number of matching tags - so you could enter "low-income" "education" "kids" in Q2-T2 and generate a score of 3 (the number of matched tags. This still requires the discipline of detail in tags, i.e. no "low-income", "low inc", "income low" etc.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:10 PM on June 6, 2018
But this isn't ideal Excel territory. If you use one cell per tag instead of one cell with a bunch of tags, then you can at least more easily do searches; if tags are in columns J-P and the data starts in row 5, you could enter text in say cell Q2 to T2 (freeze rows) and use =COUNTIF($J5:$P5, $Q$2:$T$2) in a cell in the first row, say R5 to find the number of matching tags - so you could enter "low-income" "education" "kids" in Q2-T2 and generate a score of 3 (the number of matched tags. This still requires the discipline of detail in tags, i.e. no "low-income", "low inc", "income low" etc.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:10 PM on June 6, 2018
Best answer: Maybe Airtable, perhaps using a multiple option select field?
(Note: no personal experience here -- just seen a few somewhat similar questions, and Airtable is often recommended)
posted by mean square error at 6:02 PM on June 6, 2018
(Note: no personal experience here -- just seen a few somewhat similar questions, and Airtable is often recommended)
posted by mean square error at 6:02 PM on June 6, 2018
It feels like the scope of the project is too small for most database solutions
This would be perfect for an Access database, which makes for easy imports from Excel. You want a table of Projects, a table of Tags and then another table that matches them up. This Stack Overflow answer lays it out. You can write a simple query to find a single tag pretty easily.
posted by soelo at 6:14 PM on June 6, 2018
This would be perfect for an Access database, which makes for easy imports from Excel. You want a table of Projects, a table of Tags and then another table that matches them up. This Stack Overflow answer lays it out. You can write a simple query to find a single tag pretty easily.
posted by soelo at 6:14 PM on June 6, 2018
Import into Evernote and tag them there. Or Google Keep. Supposedly OneNote also, if you're on Windows. Most of the notetaking applications have tagging as a feature.
posted by cfraenkel at 7:39 PM on June 6, 2018
posted by cfraenkel at 7:39 PM on June 6, 2018
Response by poster: Thanks everyone, I'm trying AirTables and so far it's letting me put in the tags really quickly and consistently, while seemingly being pretty easy to filter through later. Much appreciated!
posted by matrixclown at 8:09 PM on June 6, 2018
posted by matrixclown at 8:09 PM on June 6, 2018
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