How to makes quotes more accessible?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

Thanks ET

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