We are in an era where accessing a knowledge base or getting an access to an archived research document is not too far. Whether it's about school assignments, college projects, database access, or business proposal stylistics, all of us need to maintain some sort of detailed sheets that can make our work easier and faster. While researching on the web, you may feel that accessing a lot of information is a boon of digital era but again organizing the information scattered all over the web is a stiff challenge.
Doing research that's heavy on citations, setting bookmarks on web pages may not be handy for keeping a track of each source of information. Cable, a Chrome extension, comes forward to deal with all the research and database management challenges. The tool is quite helpful while conducting detailed research as it enables you to save a website's link, along with your own description, to a Google Spreadsheet document.
In this article, you'll learn how to install and start using Cable to improve your research results and keep a track on every single webpage that you've given:
Steps for Installing and using Cable
1. Go to the Chrome extensions page, search for 'Cable' in the search box, and click on the 'Install' button to install the extension.
2. When the installation process will be successfully completed, you'll see a quotation mark icon on the top-right corner of the browser.
3. Now, browse to the webpage that you want to save in the current tab, and then click on the icon.
4. While accessing this tool for the first time, a Google sign up window should prompt and ask for allow / access to your Google Drive account. Since, the searched links will be stored in the Google Spreadsheet document, click on the 'Allow' button to authorize the extension.
5. On successful sign-up to your Google account, you'll be presented with a drop-down notepad whenever you click on the quote icon.
6. Typically, the notepad will already display the current webpage's information, like article title, name of the author and URL, but if it does not appear, you can add it manually. Additionally, you can also add a tag and a brief summary to make your Google spreadsheet more reliable and easy to track the web page details.
7. When done, click on 'Create Document' option from the drop-down list on the bottom, give your document a name, and click on the 'Save' button. The new spreadsheet file will be saved in the Citable folder, located on the main page of your Google Drive account.
8. Once the spreadsheet is saved, a link will be provided to view the document and clicking on it will open the document in Google Drive, in a new tab.
9. The spreadsheet will follow a simple six columns design, including fields for title, URL, date, author, summary and tag of saved web pages.
10. You can now repeat the same process for each web page that you want to add to this list and add as your source.
The Google spreadsheet may turn really helpful while researching on different topics, as you can create various documents to manage sources separately. The edits made on these spreadsheets are applied in real time therefore you can see them soon after adding them on the spreadsheet. Apart from this, this extension can also be managed by using keyboard shortcuts. To learn the same, right-click on the icon icon and go to 'Options' menu, there you can see the four hotkeys for navigating and using the extension. Offered as a perfect solution for intensive research work including numerous citations from different sources, Citable makes the data highly organized by placing it into a nice spreadsheet.