Excel Pile

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…

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.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.

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.

it sounds like the chiral opposite of danny o’brien’s Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.

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.

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.

I make a spreadsheet comparing features and price whenever I buy something big (like a car, computer, camera, and bike).

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.

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of geeks purposely not using excel at all.

Personal models do sound attractive, however.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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].

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

• 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.

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.

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?)

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.

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/

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.

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.

I’m disappointed, nobody seems to keep track of their spreadsheets in a spreadsheet. People, you are getting sloppy!

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).

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.

Spreadsheets are for winning fantasy sports leagues! Work…naw…..

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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? :-)

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!)

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.

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!

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.

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

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…

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…

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.

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!

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!”

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.

My girlfriend and I made a ppt to present our idea of living off campus next year to our parents.

Success!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.