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.