A Blog About Making Culture
Excel Pile
April 22, 2004
Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who's ever mumbled "Asperger's..." under their breath while watching me arrange my Windows desktop.)
Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of dorkiness is the fact that almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood. There's no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one's personal life.
So I've been meaning for a few years to create a site for people to upload their spreadsheets and then explain the purpose behind them. The main concerns I had were (1) what to do when idiots uploaded files with viruses, and (2) whether to allow other types of files, to embrace those with PowerPoint fixations. Those are pretty easy to deal with by only allowing one person at a time to post and by trying to accept those of the PowerPoint persuasion, despite their obvious depravity.
Thus, it's time for a bit of market research. Have you ever made a spreadsheet for your personal life? Talked to your kids using PowerPoint? Share your geekiness, and maybe it'll justify the creation of an exciting new community of dorks.
Previously: Um, Hello!
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Closest I come was when I built an Access DB to log CDs, books, videos, serial numbers… I knew I had to stop when I started thinking about extending it to clothes…
Colin Ramsay
I made one to keep track of my accounts in this, my final year of Uni. Didn’t stick to it like, but y’know. It was still useful though - the act of laying everything out in front of you is very useful in itself.
Matt Haughey
I had one last year that basically had three columns: Date, Miles ran today, Body Weight at 9am
It only produced depressing, flat graphs instead of the downward sloping weight and upward slopping running graphs I wanted.
Olivier Travers
I have a spreadsheet (full of holes, the data is hard to find) about French national debt and other datapoints over the last 20 years. It’s related to my life in the sense that it contributed to convincing me I needed to opt out of that rotting system sooner than later. There’s no graph, because unlike Matt the slope is quite aggressive, which in that case isn’t a pretty sight (debt trebling from 20% to 60%+ of GNP in two decades, with no slowdown in sight).
Liz Tracey
Yes, yes. I have done numerous spreadsheets for budgets, book organizing, t-shirts, college credits needed, furniture inventory, moods and caffeine intake.
I’ve also done a number of PowerPoints as Love Letter. This can either backfire disastrously, or work like a charm — the only thing I can tell you is “Know your audience.”
Joost Schuur
I have an Excel sheet that meticulously tracks my TV viewing schedule and the 3 PVRs that record shows. This way I can tell what PVR to add a new show to, to prevent conflicts, and I can review the past week and make sure I watched all the shows that I wanted to watch.
I watch way too much TV.
Seth Werkheiser
I made Excel spreadsheets of cycling, esp when I was commuting to work on two wheels. I also kept track of that mornings tempature and wind chill factor - my record was 0 degrees. That ruled.
Erik Benson
The Excel spreadsheet that I’m most proud of (namely because the amount of enjoyment I got from creating it and filling it in was directly proportional with the amount of pain and torture present in the task it was meant to track) is the Nanowrimo Report Card, used (as you might guess) to track the 30 days of hell people engage in every November to write a novel. It will even give you random words of encouragement or taunting depending on how well you’re doing.
joshua schachter
it sounds like the chiral opposite of danny o’brien’s Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.
megnut
Ah, I have many, but my favorite is my latte price comparison analysis. I saw a subscription espresso service that included a really nice espresso machine at steep discount. I know they always get you with the subscription on those things, so I broke down the various offers they were making and compared them to four/five lattes a week at the local coffee shop and the price of using the French press pot at home. Never got the machine, though the numbers looked good for it. Mostly I think it was the fun of the analysis, discovering if I’d really get a deal or not.
claxton6
For about three months, I tracked all of my grocery bills in a spreadsheet, noting product, brand, quantity (in up to three different units), price, discount, and store, with price per quantity calculated.
May
I make a spreadsheet comparing features and price whenever I buy something big (like a car, computer, camera, and bike).
Matt
I never use Excel. Sometimes I do put silly things in MySQL tables though. Most of my personal tracking stuff goes into a local wiki I set up on my laptop.
Ross Mayfield
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of geeks purposely not using excel at all.
Personal models do sound attractive, however.
Chuck Welch
Three spreadsheets related to a series of pulp fiction novels of the 30s and 40s.
The first to discover the “generic title” of the series by analyzing title word usage and order.
The second to find the average length of time from original publication to reprint publication. (Including quickest and slowest to reprint.)
The third to track the first appearance point of each of the six main characters in each of the 190 novels.
Yeah, I know. Crazy.
I published the results and notes on my first web site back in the mid-90s. Then, at a convention of pulp magazine collectors, I met the one woman in North America who thought the data was interesting. It proves there is someone for everyone. (Or maybe it doesn’t. I need to check the data.)
BAJ
My latest personal XLS was to compare digital cameras. I had details like thumbnail, price, optical zoom, storage type, storage size, etc. as different columns. Well, finally I settled for a Canon Powershot A80.
Some other previous ones were for tracking telephone usage, and an address book which I could export as CSV to Yahoo! Address Book.
kasei
Never in excel, but I’ve got an RDF/XML file documenting every beer I drink, with the brewery and beer name, size of the beer, and the date, time and place where it was consumed.
Adam
I set up a ‘personal progress’ chart to daily-chart and graph my weight, % body fat (via a Tanita scale), number of pushups done, and a few other assorted physical and mental fitness measurements and checkoffs.
After a minor foot injury left me unable to dance or kickbox for a few weeks (and resulting in a weight gain of 4 pounds), I haven’t yet gotten ‘back on the wagon’… and as I’ve watched my progress flatline, doing the chart each day got too depressing, so I did the only logical thing: stopped documenting my un-progress :D
eric
i created a spreadsheet to compute “innocence”—that is, one night stands versus relationship sex, given in shags-per-lad [or, in metric, cubic deci-newton-litres of spooge taken at room-temperature at sea level].
Brian
I have Excel spreadsheets to keep track of everytime I fill up my car (tracking the mileage, days between fillup, price of gas and of course averages of all those) all of my books (and who I’ve lent them out to), all of my video and board games and I’m trying to get one started for all of my cd/vhs/dvd/vcds. I’m sure Access or some such would work better for most of these, but I find Access to be such an annoying pain in the butt that I’ll just stick with Excel.
Patrick
When living with two roommates, I made an Excel spreadsheet tracking our common expenses, allowing for expenses that were shared between all three or only two of us, so that we could “balance” our accounts monthly instead of splitting each bill. Entry columns were color-coded, and conditional formatting was used to indicate who owed money and who was owed. I thought it was really very elegant (in a pathetic geek sort of way) but my non-geek roommates always had trouble with the inputs and copying the formulas to new rows, so it kind of fizzled out.
Even more than my geek obsession with tracking things in Excel is my geek obsession with planning space using Visio. I’ve modeled each of my last few apartments in Visio so I can play around with different furniture arrangments without getting a bunch of burly friends to move the couch all over the room. This is the singluar geeky quality that has earned me the most ridicule.
Hwheel
I have an 20-year-ongoing Excel spreadsheet, updated quarterly, called “My Life” with the following columns: Date, Address, Job, Monthly earnings, Boyfriend (5 years for the current one, but amusing information before that), and notable events during the quarter. Only the Monthly earning is graphible, but it’s a handy chart at times.
Anonymous
Sorry for posting anonymous - I’m a tad embarrased by this one. When I was 18 I made a spreadsheet of every girl I had hooked up with, and what exactly we did.
Paul G
Personally, I have a long-standing and deep-seated hatred of Excel. I have written programs from scratch for the sole purpose of avoiding having to do something in Excel. It is the bane of my existance, and my hatred of it only grows with each time that I am forced to use it.
That said, I know I have used it for all sorts of bizzare analysis and tracking, but the only one that come readily to mind is the time I set up a spreadsheet to track my bank account because my bank didn’t have electronic statements at the time and I was too poor to pick up a copy of Quicken.
Ken F
Beside one spreadsheet to track my stocks, and another to follow my bank balances, I have one that shows what’s in my CD player (200+ CDs) and the tracks on each disk.
I tend to write a lot of quick and dirty calculators to do things like printing a metric to English conversion table (my nephews were pole vaulters, and I still think in feet and inches) and marathon pacing guides.
Vasta
Too many Excel spreadsheets. One each to track my CD buying habits, my movie watching habits, my clothes shopping habits, my book reading habits.
Once had a spreadsheet to track how many times I said ‘eh’ in a day (yes, I’m Canadian).
Couldn’t live without them.
Michael Doss
I once made on paper, in spreadsheet form, a chart listing prizes won from radio station contests, as well as the station, the time, and the value. Years ago I began an excel spreadsheet to move the information to my computer, but never finished it. I would for this project.
Neil
I keep a spreadsheet of the amount of time my department secretary spends making personal phone calls on company time.
The irony, which just hit me, is that I created and currently maintain this spreadsheet on company time. Oops!
Dana VanDen Heuvel
Dude, I can’t image what life would be like without being able to disect my entire existance with the flip of a pivot table :)
Pearl
Beyond tracking expenses, for over a decade I have been maintaining an Excel file of all poetry drafts written and poems finished . A couple years ago I expanded it to chart poems read aloud, submitted and published.
Zagg
- I’ve made hundreds of excel files for every Important Sporting List I can think of like no-hitters, active HR leaders, Hall of Fame Vote totals, post-season stats, etc.
- Every Bob Dylan song I’ve seen performed live.
- Every CD I own.
- Important DFB statistics.
Ivo Michalick
I´ve also tracked my grocery bills for a few months, but found out that such was not cost-efective. Now I only have a spreadsheet with my grocery list ordered by class (frozen food, dairy items, breakfast etc.)…
I have a “universal financial” spreadsheet, where I keep my current financial data flow as well as projections of surplus for the next 8, 20 and 32 months. I tell myself I do that so I can keep my finances in a short leash and become able to buy a new apartment sometime in 2007… I also have a few support spreadsheets for this one, such as one for each credit card I have.
Every book I read also goes to a spreadsheet, so I know how many (and which ones) books I´ve read each year since 1985.
Finally, I have a spreadsheet that I update twice a year where I keep count of my CDs, and calculate a “monthly purchase rate” (yes, I still buy them, I guess I am a CD collector freak as much as I used to be a vynil one…). I divide my CDs per classes too, so I know that for the last couple of years I became specially interested in World Music (specially Arabic, Indian and African) and Downtempo (Electronic Lounge). I also know that, as prices went up, I reduced my monthly purchase rate, which by the way suffered a major setback after I got married.
m
here visits a total non- geek who has never used excel in her life. my secretary does- but i have managed to survive with ignorance…….( what am i doing here?)
ripples
Spreadsheets are pretty much the norm for me and my friends to track any kind of expenditure and also for planning trips and vacations.
Personally, I have never used PPTs , though.
elliot
I used to VBA and the Excel macro language which preceded it for simple visual graphical applications and games: Tamagotchi, an avoid-the-falling-blocks thing and a couple of gravitational models. Never went as far as Pacelman and Cellvader though: http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/
harold_ikes
i have an excel workbook detailing every run i’ve done since 2000. i log the date, milage, time, pace, shoes, and location. i track the number of miles per shoes and averages per month and year.
donna
A friend of mine recently sent me an Excel spreadsheet of what he called his “compatibility index” - If girls answered questions on it the way he did, they scored points. I thought it was very weird. It did have some sort of amusing questions and answers though, like popping up “danger danger!” when answers disagreed with his.
Olivier Travers
I’m disappointed, nobody seems to keep track of their spreadsheets in a spreadsheet. People, you are getting sloppy!
Anonymous
I’ve got my household budget in Excel, and also the index to my CD player that holds 200 CD’s. (I then convert that to text file and post it on my website). I also track all maintenance on both of our cars in Excel. I keep our master grocery list in Excel, sorted by aisle in the grocery store that we use.
At the office, I’ve got a spreadsheet where I tracked commute times (bus vs train) for a few weeks to determine the most effeceint way to get to and from work. (The answer is bus Mon-Thur, Train on Friday).
steve koppelman
I can’t say as I’ve ever made such a spreadsheet. In any event, to avoid the virus problems and other weirdness, you’ll probably want to write a server piece that takes in the submitted .xls, turns it into HTML (or a series of HTML pages if there are multiple tabs), and if you do want to redistribute them, maybe strip the macros and resave it. Probably not tough stuff compared to writing spreadsheet macros that really do something.
The licensing costs of opening a copy of Excel to a public web interface could be sidestepped by doing the whole thing with OpenOffice, which can indeed run headless.
monkeyinabox
Spreadsheets are for winning fantasy sports leagues! Work…naw…..
Arjun Singh
I find you people very inspiring. I must admit to be using Excel for much more mundane purposes. Being a more visual person, I think I would do more of the crazy stuff in powerpoint. Can’t wait to create my first love letter in powerpoint…
Anonymous
While I was in undergrad, I once took the CDC’s annual “Health, United States” table of life expectancy and wrote a spreadsheet that would calculate the percentage of average life expectancy consumed to the present day, for a list of years of birth, and also how much each day of life was worth. Readers either found it really motivating or really demotivating.
Life is short, and getting shorter by the minute.
Nick Douglas
A spreadsheet of people I had to call for work over a one-week project. Another one for people willing to help out with my film projects.
Beeble
I used to use one to track my wife’s period :\ I won’t be uploading that, though!
I’ve also used it to solve word puzzles (a letter in each cell, sorting and filtering using formulae), track my time while contracting (macros), household budgeting, inventory of items in the house when moving (sortable by type, room, destination room etc.)…
and many, MANY more! I can really identify with this project.
Josephine Hardy
I’ve tracked almost every aspect of my life in spradsheets at one time or another, I graphed/pivoted/trended all of it. The 2 longest lasting ones are the household finances (into which I download my bank statements - before my bank went on-line I used TYPE PAGES OF THEM IN MANUALLY), and the lottery syndicate which I run for my colleagues at work (which tracks and anlyses members, contributions, winnings etc). But I’ve also tacked my weight, my collections, my running log (which would work out how long it was going to take me to run the equivalent distance from London to Auckland).
These days I get most of my fix at work, were I am in and out of excel virtually all day. I love spreadsheets… I love the idea of a group of spreadsheet lovers.
Anonymous
How long have I been seeking thee fellow excel geeks! I started putting all my fianancial aid expenses into an excel spreadsheet in grad school then added up the whole cost of everything that had to do with school. Today I have a massive spreadsheet with the balances of every account I have historically going back 3 years with graphs showing when I put money in and when i took it out. I also update all my bank accounts at least twice a day while im in work cause im bored.
cmb
My friends think I’m a geek because I track my menstrual cycle in a spreadsheet. (I haven’t told them about the books read Access database.) I’ve got nothing on you people! I’ve also got a long way to go…
Anonymous
I have one for movies, combining IMDb top 250 lists from various days, Videohound’s list of 4-bone films, Maltin’s list of 4-stars, Oscar winners, which are in the U.S. National Registry, etc., all of course with columns for if the film is available at the local library, if I’ve seen it, and what I thought of it.
What I’m finding is that I find the IMDb lists most consistently interesting. I’ve also found that Leonard Maltin has a strong aversion to violence and a tendency to rate a film lower than most other critics if it downplays the importance of family (q.v. his ratings of The Shining, The Godfather, and Goodfellas).
kirkjerk
A lot of software developer / old-school-unix geeks have a bit of an allergy to excel…old school tab-delimited text files it is for us! With a quick perl script to do anything else we want.
Actually, one thing I should try to get ready for a public release is k/db, which is essentially a one-table spreadsheet-ish display, that automatigically generates a UI for adding or editing rows of data, with different UI HTML widgets.
joshua
It seems to me that many people use Excel more as an ad-hoc database than as a modeling tool. Which is fine, but it really bugs me that I can’t rename columns. Lotus Improv had a lot of neat features like that.
There’s some neat linux-oriented discussion on the future of spreadsheets at cbbrowne’s spreadsheet page.
Anonymous
Like claxton6, I, too, tracked my grocery purchases by date, price, and product, only I used MySQL and a PHP front end. I also included the aisle in which the product was purchased, and used the data to develop future shopping lists sorted in walk order. I realized that this was something about which to be embarrassed, and knocked it off after a few months.
I’m not a spreadsheet fan, but I have used one each year to track Christmas present purchases. It lists the last four years of purchases, listing, by person, how much I budgeted, how much I actually spent, what I got them, what I spent last year, and what I’ve spent on them on average.
Waldo Jaquith
Like claxton6, I, too, tracked my grocery purchases by date, price, and product, only I used MySQL and a PHP front end. I also included the aisle in which the product was purchased, and used the data to develop future shopping lists sorted in walk order. I realized that this was something about which to be embarrassed, and knocked it off after a few months.
I’m not a spreadsheet fan, but I have used one each year to track Christmas present purchases. It lists the last four years of purchases, listing, by person, how much I budgeted, how much I actually spent, what I got them, what I spent last year, and what I’ve spent on them on average.
arlo
I brought my North American digital alarm clock to Britain with me, not realizing that the difference in electrical frequencies (60 Hz vs 50 Hz) would make the clock run slow, even with a converter. Rather than purchase a new alarm clock, I created a spreadsheet so that, given a target wake-up time and the actual current time, I could look up the time I should set in order to wake up at just the right moment.
John
I have a speadsheet for keeping track of how long it takes the voicemail light on my phone to come on after someone leaves a message, and another spreadsheet for keeping track of the number of spam messages I get over night (and an estimated number of spam per day) from both before and after my company installed a spam filter.
Adrian
Oh god yes. I’ve tacked weight loss, fiance, exchange rates, loans, car miles. Anything that at some point required a table of more than 4 items I’ve probably put into Excel.
Circular Error
I used to work in a small real estate development company with an outrageously abusive boss. People quit so frequently that my friend & I set up a “next-to-go” spreadsheet. It had the name of the employee, how many days they had been employed, a guestimate of how likely they were to quit, and an over/under of how long it would take for each person to quit. We used it to make bets as to who would quit next and how long it would take. When fully staffed, the company had 30 people. In 18 months, 90 people quit!!
bryan kennedy
I have been addicted to spreadsheets from a young age, booting my dad’s secretary out of the computer chair so I could do more Lotus tutorials. Excel is the only reason I bother with ‘getting’ office anymore. I have set up a bunch of scientific spreadsheets to calculate oxygen iron conversions in geo-chemistry, to keep track of the electricity used by a 10,000 degree furnace (and estimate repair future), to track my weight:running:date:candy consumption ratios, to keep track of a 3,000 LP record database, and most recently I have embarked on a project with a friend of mine to figure out which track on a album is most likely to be the BEST. We are listening to a bunch of albums, recording our favorite tracks in Excel, and then doing some statistical manipulation and graphing to determine which track is most likely to hold our favorite song. There really isn’t enough data yet…..but if this Excel community got started I would be happy to turn it public.
Of course I have this super depressing personal debt spreadsheet over the last 5 years, at least the graph is pointing downward now. For a little while I tried to graph my hours of sleep to see if there was any sort of seasonal change but….I got to tired and stopped.
abi
My strangest spreadsheet is probably the pregnancy tracker I’ve used for both of my children. It calculated the dates of the trimesters, with a field showing which trimester I was in, the percentage of the pregnancy completed and yet to go, and the number of weeks completed and yet to go (pregnancies are counted in weeks for medical purposes). Towards the end of the pregnancy I would add a section in for the number of weeks, working days, and hours (adjusted for lunch breaks) until starting maternity leave. Because I would use the sheet for the three months before announcing the pregnancy at the office, all cell labels were in code.
Second strangest comes from an idle habit of mine. Before I worked with computers, I used to punch random numbers into a calculator, then factor them to find the highest prime factor. So when I changed jobs into IT, I naturally developed a spreadsheet that does that for me with every refresh. How sad is that? :-)
Tara
I will vouch for Erik’s Nanowrimo Report Card, as I have used that spreadsheet in the past with much satisfaction. I also have my own spreadsheet to track how many words of my novel I write each night, how long it takes, and my average words per minute.
I’ve also got one called, simply, People. It’s a spreadsheet with the pertinent (and not-so-pertinent) data of every single person I know. It goes from normal things like addresses and phone numbers, to obscure stuff like a Y/N column for whether or not I’ve ever gone to a baseball game with that person. My dream is to put this all into a SQL database at some point and make it accessible via a nice GUI. (This is obviously not one I would share!)
Buzz
I am addicted to spreadsheets. As a professor, I have used them on and off as grading programs, filled with macros to sort, resort, hide names, print, etc. I find at the end of the semester, it is unusable for the next semester and have to start all over again. They just grow, and never get smaller.
One year, I was so obsessed with NCAA basketball, that one year, I tracked the weekly top 25 polls (AP and coaches), color-coded my favorite teams, and watched them drop down week after week, until finally falling off the list. I tried to create another spreadsheet again the next season, but didn’t have the same enthusiasm as before, realizing that, although I love basketball, it was the novelty of putting together the sheet that gave me the rush.
Bob
I work in a tech support call center, and awhile back I started tracking the time/length/duration/zipcode of the calls I took. No excell (I used python and postgresql along with gnuplot). I could generate daily graphs showing when calls came in and how long they lasted, as well as weekly calls per day graphs. The best part was referencing zipcodes to latitude/longitute, then graphing points on a globe using xplanet! :) Then I could tell exactly where the people were that I had talked to, as well as when I had talked to them. Now that’s geeky!
Romulus
Answer to 1): Accept CSV instead. Besides, expecting Excel format is so non-OSS tacky.
An on top of it, calling it “Excel Pile” is just asking to be the target an egregious, ridiculous, overreaching lawsuit from Microsoft.
Anonymous
Whenever I roast a ham or turkey, I set the timer for 15 minutes and everytime it rings, I input the temp of the dish in to excel and plot a graph to estimate when it will be done
Anonymous
At first I wasn’t going to share, but now I see I have a relatively mild case of excelmania. When I moved into a new neighborhood once, the local video store offered a free movie for every ten receipt you returned. So I decided to save them up for free movies. I never rented any free movies once I realized I had over 100 reciepts and decided to keep them and enter into a database one day…
jp
I’m planning my wedding out of Excel. One tab for guests. Counts guests, breaking down adults and children. Linked across an expense tab, which calculates the cost based on the current guest list. Also compare caterers and locations in separate tabs…
Anonymous
Used Excel to track cycles of my wife, calculated the variability of cycles by linking into MiniTab, estimated the time period required to “carpet bomb” (99% coverage) with links into both our travel schedules, etc.. A Six Sigma and Microsoft approach to gene transference. Now we track out son’s bowel movements in Excel. I have also used Excel and Minitab to track my blood pressure as a function of the types of restaurant food I eat (fish sauce dip and Vietnamese food is bad). I can’t believe I am adding to this post…although now I feel better about being a geek.
jonny
I tracked my wristwatch’s time (down to the second) vs. the USNO master clock for months, in order to figure out its rate of time gain/loss.)
I am very proud of my quirky little watch. It gains, very repeatably, 0.316 seconds per day. (r^2 > 0.99) I’ve checked up on it occasionally since, and it’s still very predictable. I can figure the correct time down to the second up to a month after setting my watch. I enjoy telling people what time it is.
You will note that a watch (and the USNO clock site) usually display time to the nearest second. For this reason, the difference between my watch and the clock would seem stagnant for 3 to 4 days, then jump a second. I used Excel to model these jumps and predict the next day one would take place, with very good accuracy. Pretty graphs!
Rebecca
All possible combinations of the classes I could theoretically take, in case the ones I want to take are full. (Except I make a table in Word)
Sunah
I do everything in Excel! The spreadsheet I use the most is my Time Budget. I have to use my time very carefully, because I have enough money to last three more years, and there are a lot of things I want to do in three years, and degrees to which I want to do those things.
Derek
What about Excel real-time applications? I used it to chart my wife’s contractions during her first (and only) labour - which lasted a day. It helped her to prepare for the next contraction and helped us make the decision to go to the hospital. However, fitting trend lines and higher order polynomials was seen by my partner as a little distracting.
Dave's Brain
Not Excel, but I do track useless things in my life, like: my weight: http://www.davesbrain.ca/weight_chart.html my personal maladies: http://www.davesbrain.ca/dave.html and my warchalking efforts: http://www.davesbrain.ca/warchalk.html
Easter Lemming Liberal News
I only track my weight, daily, since 2000.
But I once converted my job, forecasting daily sales for department stores, into just letting me fiddle with huge spreadsheets. This was back when a 286 was the newest thing and extended memory had just come out.
I have a friend who spreadsheets everything, one of the latest was a voting system/rating system/database for what restaurants a small group should go to next.
1 on Google for Liberal NewsArt
I create lots of tiny one-off spreadsheets for any competitive purchase over about US$500 — TVs, etc. — listing manufacturers, models, features, etc.
The only major spreadsheet I maintain is a list of all of the DVDs and VHS that I own, including length, director, main actors, and a brief summary. I could use imdb (from which, honestly, I stole most of the data) or I could use a DB, but I have this OCD that the societal infrastructure will break down and I’ll have to be completely self-sufficient. .xls lives forever.
Obviously, apart from the electricity to run my computer, tv, and dvd player.
Anonymous
I have one I use to track the real names, online aliases and IM user names, FOAF affiliation, etc. of people I know. I can’t remember more than one or two ways to refer to any given person without help, and people seem to add/change them frequently. I’m considering expanding it to include birthdays.
My favorite Excel story has to be the Hamburger Hist-O-Gram a friend started at her work. The night crew had a hamburger eating contest going, they tracked it by person, date, total number of patties, and average number of patties per day per person.
Oh, and I know several people who’ve mapped their apartments in Visio (myself included). It beats the graph paper I used in grade school.
Mean Dean
I wrote about the only thing more annoying than publishing PowerPoint web presentations this past friday in a post entitled ‘When Christian Spammers and PowerPoint collide.’
Only in the case of my example, they went the distance with stupidity and annoyance by taking the images from each of the slide and concatenating them into one huge 1.5mb HTML file.
Or what I call on my blog a John 11:35 moment.
dogu
Guilty at least twice. One sheet converts data from the Alaska Climatology Center into graphs of daylight hours and the change in hours from the previoius days - nice complimentary graphs.
The second is a sheet that allows one to enter golf course information and then play ‘what if’ to see how to best improve one’s game. The sheet is based around several parameters including hole yardage, distance of tee shot, distance of all following shots (off green), and number of putts. For what it’s worth, the biggest contributor for most golfers is number of putts - if you hit everything 150 yards and 2 putt, you’re playing bogie golf.
ej
Workbooks are most certainly the wave that I’ve had on lock since I can rememebr. With pivot tables, having my MP3 catalog being able to be converted from MusicMatch library exports, and my budget, I can honestly say that I am a technogeek, and will be forever more.
lillian
Hi, my name is Lillian, and I’m obsessed with Excel spreadsheets. One of my favorites is making them after exams where the instructor posts the grades of the entire class. People ask why I do it, “Doesn’t that take a while??” No, it’s easy to do. And I do it because it’s fun. I guess “fun” is one of those relative words.
I know this isn’t documenting an “arcane aspect” of my life, but it still somehow distances me from people who have little functional knowledge of Excel. Besides, I REALLY enjoy comparing myself to others on test scores. Oh, and I love bar charts - so I can truly pinpoint my grade in comparison to others.
Here’s another example. My boyfriend and I share a credit card. After I make a purchase, I give my receipts to him. He suggested we (and when he says “we,” he means me) make an Excel spreadsheet to keep all of our expenses together. He also mentioned we could track specific expenses (e.g., gas, dining out, groceries, etc.) to know what we’re spending. With overzealous excitement, I proclaimed, “Yeah, and I could make a pie chart to show the percentage we’re spending in each area.” He just kinda’ stared at me, snickered, and called me a nerd. He’s not quite sure how I can get so excited over making Excel spreadsheets. Duh? Cuz it’s fun!
Gordon Robbins
I had a supervisor (I work in a power plant) chastise me for not having experience in Excel. So I set out to ‘show him’. I started by making a timesheet spreadsheet. Then I decided I wanted it to show me how much net pay would be on my paycheck, so I ended up having to import tax tables, which unfortunately has to be done each year but not too hard now that the groundwork is done. Then I decided I needed a perpetual calendar to plot out all 4 crews on the rotating 12 hour shift we work, and that got tacked onto the timesheet workbook. Then I decided I wanted to track PTO (personal time off) and floating holidays remaining in the year, and that was added. I’ve been kicking around the very do-able idea of making a worksheet to help schedule individuals on a rotating shift. Now I am called in from time to time to help straighten out the books when they get screwed up. On the back of my hard hat I have in labelmaker tape “Live to Excel, Excel to Live!”
Manik
I created one to plan my wedding last year.
Coming from a traditional Indian family, undoubtedly my folks found it downright weird but hey, I was able to plan it quite well.
Of course there were a couple of funny arguments around items like gifts to relatives etc. but overall, it was a worthwhile experience.
Nathan
My girlfriend and I made a ppt to present our idea of living off campus next year to our parents.
Success!
Phil
I actually still maintain an Excel spreadsheet of my graduation requirements, broken down into each major, each minor, and each bit of my general studies (categorically, there).
Almost done with it, luckily.
dayment
Made an excel spreadsheet for Christmas Cookies one year - some friends and I made over 1000 cookies to pass out.
It wasn’t as much geekiness; more like necessary!
tri
I’ve created an excel file that indexes the novel Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m working on an online encyclopedia of the Mars trilogy.
Mean Dean
Well, as long as it is true confession time … I did create one excel spreadsheet. It was used to track all the other spreadsheets in the office (excel &/or otherwise). I created a lengthy powerpoint presentation to demonstrate to my coworkers how to use it. I exported the ppt to MS publisher to finish off my webpages.
Seano
I made a powerpoint presentation for my wife about why I love her. She loved the transitions.
She loves me for who I am. sigh
As for excel, it makes the best outliner and address book in the world.
Mike
Thanks for sharing your stories. I now feel a little less freakish about:
1) Finances with obdc web queries to my checking account and various stock prices. Projected expenses are light gray, payments that I have authorized but have not posted yet are dark gray, and completed transactions are black. Plus hypothetical models for various salary/mortgage scenarios. Our company puts our paystubs online, so I can web query those too; I made a macro to create a new tab for each one. 2) Detailed mileage log for the car that tracks fuel costs/consumption rates, plus predicts when scheduled maintenance will be due. 3) Excel artwork that creates a warped space illusion with the gridlines, plus paints a checkerboard pattern in the cell backgrounds. 4) Failed attempts create tetris in excel. I guess I’ll be studying http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/ to figure out runtime input.
Betsy Devine
Oh, what an enjoyable comment thread! (And you gave me some great new ideas for wasting more time.) I never got good at Excel because FileMaker Pro lets me do all the obsessive stuff I’ve wanted so far—for example, sorting my database of jokes based on the number of words in each one. (That is rather work-related for jokebook authors.) When I moved, I used FMP to create a one-to-one mapping of storage areas in the old and new houses. Frequent flyer miles have their own little database, with rude comments about most airlines in the “misc” field. My usual “misc” field with its rude remarks is something I’d miss if I ever switched to Excel.
pea
I’ve used Excel to track fitness goals, monthly expenditures, etc. The one I had most fun with was the one that tracked my debt…and when the Total cell read $0 I was beyond happy.
I converted the org’s timesheet from Word to Excel so that I would no longer have to bother with a calculator. That was about 6 years ago. I have every single timesheet ever turned in. Why? Don’t know. Why not?
Jeff Tupholme
Too many to list, some with calculations (miles per gallon achieved, rent inflation) and some without (‘backup’ for mobile phone configurations). Price and quality of coffee, well that would be an obvious intranet app..! Would be great to be able to ‘open source’ some of these off my hard drive!
Pinolo
I once tracked with Excel peaks in my hayfever for about 2-3 months. The I brought it to my doctor and she said: “Should I read it?”
Kevin Breit
I am maintaining a spreadsheet that documents how many spams get into my inbox per day. The purpose is to see what changes to Spamassassin work and what don’t.
Phillip Winn
Leaving aside the price-shopping spreadsheets, which I tend to divide into tabs to track historical data. You really would be amazed to know how much CompactFlash card used to cost!
Anyway, leaving those aside, I have elaborate spreadsheets (with graphs) for my Netflix rental history, my Google Adsense earnings, my NaNoWriMo progress, and, well, I’ll stop there before I really embarass myself.
The thing is, you reall must see these spreadsheets to believe them. My AdSense spreadsheet includes eight tabs, five of which are graphs, and requires exactly three pieces of data per day to drive all of the rest. I think that my budget spreadsheets and loan amortization (with early payoff) spreadsheets are truly works of art.
Sigh, I’m a bigger geek than I had realized.
Anonymous
Like a couple of other posters, I use Access databases instead of spreadsheets. It works best for the type of data I record: DVD collection, books read (entered data from paper journals dating back to 1987 and kept up to date), etc. If I want to create charts and graphs, all I have to do is create a report and export the data to Excel. At work I’ve created spreadsheets to keep track of the temperatures in my office (over 80 degrees all winter long).
Anonymous
I was sure they were putting more brown Peanut M&Ms in those individual size servings. I’ve got 18 months worth of data (one package every work day with lunch) to tell me I was wrong: yellow(!)@ 22%, then red @ 20%, blue @ 19% and finally brown @ 18%. Green and Orange are last with 12 and 10%.
My wife told me that it had better be a joke when she heard about it.
Slim
I track by blood pressure with excel and my wifes 5k training.
dawnkeyotie
I have a problem with spreadsheets. Budget; diet; pet care (vet, food, litter, toys); index of interior design magazines with pages i liked, cross referenced by category (kitchen, bathroom, boudoir, and so on); books that i’ve read (own or borrow or toss, how many times i’ve read it), exercise, meditation & yoga (briefly), and a master list of all the papers n junk i had filed away in a horrible, complicated filing system - with cross-referencing, of course. ahem
I’ve stopped all that, now. Had to go cold turkey. It was going nowhere good.
Eva
In August 2002 I moved form Holland to Canada, and I could not bring all my books, so I set up a remarkably organized list to search for all my books by title or author, and it would show where the book was (“In Canada” or, if it was in Holland “Box 7”, etc.) The boxes I left behind were all numbered and stored in my parent’s attic, and they have a printed copy of the big list. It has actually been used several times: -My mother asked me if my sister could borrow a book from me. I said: “sure, just find the box and take it out and mark it on the list.” She did, she used the list, and the book was “in Canada”. I checked my bookshelves, and she was right! There it was! I had it right next to me and she could see that way across the ocean! How utterly geeky… -I have been needing/wanting books that I knew I owned, but couldn’t find. I checked the list, and saw what box it was in, and asked my parents to include it in their next package to me. It was easy for them to find, there were only about 10-30 books in every box, so a small enough pile to go through and find a book.
Unfortunately: -I don’t remember whether or not this was done in ExCel. I think it was, because the printouts do look like that, but I am the FIRST to admit that it is totally unnecessary because there are no numbers. (I think I just wanted a table that I could easily sort by different categories.) And people who use Excel for things without numbers are one of my biggest pet peeves, so I am highly annoyed with myself! -I did a big intercontinental book move last summer without updating the list -I bought and got lots more books that I didn’t add. -I kinda sorta also lost the list…
If I do re-find it, and if is in Excel, you can have it for your project. It’s probably half in Dutch and half in English, but so is my book collection.
enda
Started from the day I graduated from college I have made excel sheets, graphics, monthly and weekly average calcuation and all, to count and see how many resumes and job application i have been sending over the past 6 months until i finally get a job.
Pete Prodoehl
Hmmmm, no self-respecting geek that I know would be caught dead using Excel or PowerPoint by choice…
Perhaps writing a perl module to do some of these things would be more appropriate.
Michael B.
I’ve built and currently maintain two spreadsheets. One is to track my bike traincing and racing and the other is sunrise and sunset. My bike spreadsheet is huge- I track everything from pre-ride meals to humidity to wind direction LOL. For 3 years!
mishmosh
Does writing your own software to track your baby’s sleeping, feeding, and diaper patterns count? Ben MacNeill did that at http://www.trixieupdate.com. Crikey!
tara
Excel is my favorite MS app - Fairly straightforward and intuitive for everyday tracking, but filled with capabilites beyond my wildest statistical fantasies. Here are my spreadsheets: 1) food.xls - my food diary, tracks everything I eat, nutritional information, my weight (measured weekly), and issues pertaining to my weight loss efforts. 2) finance.xls - tracks my budget, money spent, debts, and assets. I have charts comparing my expenses monthly, yearly, and by expense type from 2002. 3) xmas.xls - one tab per year, each year lists christmas card list, gift ideas, what I actually ended up getting my loved ones, and costs involved.
Markus
I recently started a project to track the visitors on my homepage using access and excel, (http://reauktion.de/cgi-bin/vanilla.r?selector=display&snip=2004-04-26-analysis) learning funny things about them. Also, I track my grades and my grade point average in study in excel. Heck, I’m a geek… :)
The Tube
Best spreadsheet: searchable database of all Oscar Winners. Can search by year, actor/actress, or movie. Perfect for those inane and trivial conversations that involve questions like, “Yeah, who DID win Best Actor in 1961?”
Runner up: Spreadsheet of all major sports championships since their inception. Can search by team to see exactly how many championships they have won, or at least participated in.
Cairo
I’m using one to chart how much I eat against how much I weigh, adjusting for activity and displaying my weight loss range in the chart. I especially like the ability to plot a trendline on the weightloss data.
On another page, I created a sorted list that tells me how much I have to eat of certain foods to get 100 grams of protein.
Stan
An Excel spreadsheet and accompanying graphs trend the chemistry of my aquarium: ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, ph, etc. 4 years running now. Nerd? Moi?
Gordon Robbins
Well, here’s another one. My wife is Australian and went back year before last to visit the relatives. We live in California, which is usually 17 hrs behind Sydney, and the flight is around 14.5 hrs long. I made an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the time difference for flight arrivals and departures, and listed the relatives phone numbers, incorporating allowable times to phone, etc. So when I’d pull up the spreadsheet it would conditionally state whether or not it was OK to call, and what the time was there. Also I once made a spreadsheet to calculate how much time was saved by driving 85 mph as opposed to 65 going to work, and that soon warped into a multistage trip planner. I love Excel.
dille
When our son was just born, he was a bit on the skinny side, so we were instructed to “monitor how much milk goes in”. Of course, this involved an Excel sheet, which was upgraded to show averages and graphs.
Our son is now two and a half, and doing fine. We did away with the silly spread sheet within a year as it became more and more of a burden, and junior was doing fine anyway.
We still have that sheet, though…
adam
Late to the party, but that’s ok:
I made a spreadsheet recently for my new coffee roaster. Roasting is a very delicate matter, and the oz. of coffee roasted, the time in the roaster, the exact moment of the audible cracks (2 of them) during the roasting process, all of this adds up to a good cup, and I’ve been keeping track of the batches that I roast with a spreadsheet. Roast too light, and it tastes like wood. Roast too long, and the fire alarms in the house go off. Somewhere in betweeen is a good cup.
Michael Bowen
Top 100 movies four ratings each.
Chad Fowler
A coworker and I who used to carpool had a spreadsheet (actually we used Minitab) that recorded our routes to and from work, the time of the day we took the trip, which of us was driving, which day of the week, and how long it took us. The goal was to find statistically provably fastest routes based on any factor we could control, because we hated the ride to and from work.
We didn’t see it through unfortunately. And I’m still traveling to and from the same job wishing it didn’t take so damned long.
Shopping Geek
As a shopaholic/geek, I used an Excel spreadsheet to document all the restaurants, cafes, museums and boutiques that I wanted to visit while vacationing in Paris, including the address, phone number, and arrondisement (district number). I sorted it by arrondisement and then by category, so that no matter where I was in the city, I had a great place to sight-see, eat or shop.
Mike Lietz
The only personal spreadsheet I’ve made is for my burgeoning MP3 CD collection, with buttons to sort by artist, disc or genre. Sure, I’m only up to 41 but that’s already some two hundred albums and sixty audiobooks, and this way I can find them in seconds.
Now all I need is a way to alphabetize last names without switching to a last, first format or making a separate column. Carl Hiaasen shouldn’t show up before George Carlin, darnit.
shantanuo
- I save my “Passwords list”, “Grocery list” in excel using different sheets.
- since last 3 years I save everything in .csv format so that I can easily import it in my mySQL database.
- A list of all the domain names I own, I will like to buy and when they expire.
MRM
I wanted to create an excel for tracking personal finance…stumbled across this site and ended up wasting time reading about other people’s geekiness…
thank you for wasting my time :)
RWF
I once made a series of Excel tables and macros to document the time I spent using Excel! Between April 14 2005 and 6 August 2005 it logged that I had spent almost 4.5 days on the wonderful application doing other more weird and wonderful things.
Amit
“The Billy Joel project” …its basically one sheet that has the lyrics of the song “we didnt start the fire” …various words/phrases are in various cells so that u can either roll over your mouse and see in comment what that word/phrase means or either click it to find the description. - amag
Sabyasachi
I need to take values from Excel Worksheet with different file names and enter those values in Access Database.Can you help me in this process.I need it urgently for my project.
Thalia
Anyone else getting an urge to track these comments in a spreadsheet?
Jo Ann
Totally guilty. My collections of Dungeons and Dragons books, Simpsons figures, comics, versions of the Sims and Pokemon…
Helen
This is fantastic! I’m just sad that you apparently haven’t gotten around to creating a site for Excel fetishists to upload their weird and wonderful files (sans data) to - I’d love to have seen some of them :)
I’ve used Excel for years to track innumerable different aspects of my life - the latest being TomTom compatible mobile phones and their prices and features. The table on TomTom’s own site is frankly appalling if you are trying to actually choose your next phone with compatibility in mind: it is little more than a straight list.
I also have an extensive house buying workbook containing absolutely everything I need to know about the various different mortgage offers, and deposit funds (including infromation on my shares as part of this - this is how I found this site: I wanted to know how to get realtime info on this automatically), on to yearly PnL and monthly Cashflows to make sure I can afford it all, including such necessities as white goods for the kitchen!
I’m so glad there are others like me out there - my ex used to think I was insane!
PS - whoever it was who used Visio to do space planning in thei rooms… now that IS insane! what you want is a nice 3D program so you can model all the objects and see what the end effect looks like - if you realy go the whole hog you might want to animate getting the objects into the room, just to make sure you can… not that anyone would actually go that far, would they…? o:P
CJ
I made a massive fantasy baseball draft sheet in excel, complete with draft timer, sortable stats, drafted / undrafted status, “value watch list” for buy-low candidates…it was beyond overkill but I loved it.
don davis
two years ago, i made an excel chart showing how the dates of western easter & eastern orthodox pascha follow an 8x19 = 152-year cycle, more-or-less. i started it because i manage a chorus that sings russian orthodox music, and our spring concert schedule is affected by the easter/pascha calendar disparity. but, i finished it just out of curiosity/obsessiveness. i have a screenshot of the colored chart, in .png format, but i can’t figure out how to post it here. send me an email msg, if you want me to send you the picture. and yes, i am religious (eastern orthodox) - don davis, boston, ma usa
