It only produced depressing, flat graphs instead of the downward sloping weight and upward slopping running graphs I wanted.

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 watch way too much TV.

Personal models do sound attractive, however.

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.)

Some other previous ones were for tracking telephone usage, and an address book which I could export as CSV to Yahoo! Address Book.

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

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.

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.

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.

Once had a spreadsheet to track how many times I said 'eh' in a day (yes, I'm Canadian).

Couldn't live without them.

The irony, which just hit me, is that I created and currently maintain this spreadsheet on company time. Oops!

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.

Personally, I have never used PPTs , though.

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).

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.

Life is short, and getting shorter by the minute.

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.

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.

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).

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.

There's some neat linux-oriented discussion on the future of spreadsheets at cbbrowne's spreadsheet page.

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'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.

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.

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'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!)

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.

An on top of it, calling it "Excel Pile" is just *asking* to be the target an egregious, ridiculous, overreaching lawsuit from Microsoft.

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!

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 News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Success!

Almost done with it, luckily.

It wasn't as much geekiness; more like necessary!

She loves me for who I am. *sigh*

As for excel, it makes the best outliner and address book in the world.

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.

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?

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.

My wife told me that it had better be a joke when she heard about it.

I've stopped all that, now. Had to go cold turkey. It was going nowhere good.

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.

Perhaps writing a perl module to do some of these things would be more appropriate.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

thank you for wasting my time :)

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