I used Excel in college to design a somewhat complex mechanical linkage for a class project. I had all the links on a graph and then used a macro to animate the graph so that I could see the linkage in motion and see if there would be any interferance problems.

The spreadsheet actually turned out to be very useful when we were actually building the linkage. The length of one link was off, so I was able to use the spreadsheet to see how that would impact the entire linkage and how to adjust the other links so that the linkage would perform as intended.

I use Excel to jot down all my ideas for sites and other stuff. It’s faster than writing it down and it can be organized very quickly.

The Chairman of our engineering department in college liked to use Excel for anything (even remotely) possible. My favorite was using a large table of cells that average their adjacent cells to predict voltage levels in an electric field. Really, it was just a bnunch of circular refernces but it really did work and the resulting graphs were amazing.

Similar to Derek above, I also use Excel for a softball league. Lineups, boxscores, scorecards, stats, etc. are all kept in the master spreadsheet. The team loves it.

I forgot that I downloaded some quizzes in Excel a few weeks ago.

Go to “Using Microsoft Office for Fun!” here: http://pigpog.com/node/1337 and look under “Excel.”

The music quiz is massive — 270 bands. I feel so lame because I can only positively identify 86 of them.

Basic tip? Hmmmm…

I guess, that excel isn’t just good for parsing numbers and words in various methods — if you set the line height and width to be the same, you use excel for many things that you’d want graph paper for.

I’ve used it to chart knitting patterns, many times. You could also use it to create — or store — crosswords, I would think…

My current favorite Excel use is to track my running progress. I use a log developed by David Hayes (http://www.davidhays.net/running/runlog/runlog.html), and the geek in my just loves it. Sometimes being able to fill out the run information is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning…

I use it to track projects also like others have said (one column for major project type, one columnn for step number, one column for step description, one column for due date…).

For newbie tips: You really just have to get into it and play around. Taking Excel classes would also be a great idea, since a lot of the tools aren’t intuitive. I think, also, if you’re naturally an organized person (or, like me, a control freak) you just start to look for different ways to use Excel. As others have mentioned, Excel is so easy to sort and organize. Just know what information you want to be able to group by, and put those in separate columns.

Amy > I think I love you! That sounds like something I’d do, and exactly how my friends would react too!

I use PearBudget, well, I’m trying to at least.

I have an Excel spreasheet of (original) Law and order episodes from season one to the present season. Episode title, description, orginal air-date and whether or not I’ve seen it. I also have season by season percentage watched and overall percentage watched. I have also started additional tabs for the SUV and CI series.

When I was a schoolteacher, I used Excel to track my students’ mastery of specific objectives. I could not only see at a glance whether my students were demonstrating competence in, say, double-digit addition, I could tailor assignments for specific students and print out progress reports with a single click.

Now that I have a one-man consulting business, I use Excel for the bread-and-butter accounting. The only real flourish is a worksheet I’ve set up to calculate my current and estimated annual taxes as my income and expenses change. This way, I can always feel confident that I’m setting aside enough for Uncle Sam.

I knew a guy who is a composer who once figured out how to use Excel to write inverse canons…

My dad used to have a spreadsheet that created a randomized graph of a sierpinsky fractal. I think that’s kinda geeky. Ehh. And also kinda cool.

Back when I was an undergrad (in Astronomy), one of my profs had us use Excel to model stellar interiors. The formulas to specify the various properties of a star (mass, luminosity, temperature, pressure) as a function of radius are well known and fairly easy to code.

Mind you this was back in the 80s before fancy schmancy pivot tables and that stuff. It was a great introduction to Excel which has served me well in my non-astronomy career.

Back in the late 90’s I was in college and doing programming work for a small computer company in Pasadena. The client that I was working with at the time was a doctor who specialized in interpreting EEG data. Basically, he could look at an EEG, combine it with other patient information and decide appropriate treatment. Apparently, part of the EEG data analysis was automatable and this doctor had written a program to do just that. It was written in Excel and it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

If you aspire to write convoluted and inscrutable programs you will never do better than this. It put perl programs to shame. In terms of sheer incomprehensibility, about the only thing I’ve seen since that comes close is BrainFuck. To give you some idea of why Excel was so unsuitable a tool consider that it’s input consisted of raw binary files and it’s output consisted of PDFs.

Variables were arbitrarily chosen cells and did not make use of Excel’s naming abilities. An accumulator then might be t:47. Function were just wickedly complicated formulas. It was huge and a total mess. Most amazing of all, it worked. Flawlessly.

You would saddle it up with some raw EEG data and then just walk away. This is the only Excel spreadsheet I’ve encountered whose runtime was measured in minutes. It took between 20 and 40 minutes to process all the data and output a PDF. Part of our job was to write supporting software that fed our insatiable black box a steady diet of virgin EEG files. I came to think of it as the labyrinth. We threw an endless stream of virgins into the pit and out came Minotaur droppings.

The doctor fully realized his creation was unmaintainable and knew that part of the reason for its excruciatingly poor performance was that it ran in Excel. He wanted us to tack a crack at rewriting it in an actual programming language. We tried but gave up in howling pain after just a few days.

I hadn’t used Excel for much by the time I took that job. It took me years to cleanse the bad associations and learn to love Excel.

Fess up! You’re really just going to hire some pretty models to read these various comments in a catchy apple-esque ad campaign for MS Excel.

Being a database nerd, I beg Tralee to encourage proper use of Excel when working with data. Namely, use the first row for column headers, not a page title. Don’t make us database nerds work to hard to find the data when your spreadsheet reaches the point where it needs to be a database. Use a text box from the drawing tools if you need a title up there at top.

[…] Wild and Crazy Excel Spreadsheets:  What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What’s the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program?  Tell is to Merlin Mann at 43 Folders. […]

In college, I created an animated spreadsheet that, through iterations, displayed the progression or extinction of a stylized disease epidemic.

For fun, I have a spreadsheet to track solving the letter-substitution games like cryptoquip, etc. I’ve wanted to make one for the sodoku puzzles, haven’t had time to play with that one.

Quilting patterns. Both visually representative of the ultimate layout and calculating how much fabric of each color I need. I know there are programs for quilters to do that for you…but those are extra money!! Also, I use excel to track book, movie, and music collection and wishlist with tracking for market values on Ebay/Half.com/Amazon Marketplace. As an executive recruiter, I use excel spreadsheets to track what resumes I’ve submitted, where they are in the process, next step, and keep track of all submissions to my personal clients.

My geekiest use of Excel is to create HTML tables from tabular spreadsheet data.

The trick is to put the opening and closing cell markup in a new column between each column of data. Be sure to include the opening and closing row markup on the first and last column. Then, using the fill feature, duplicate the markup down for each row.

Select and copy the cells, paste into a text editor, remove the tabs with search & replace, wrap in a table element and season with CSS to taste.

While working for a financial consulting company 6 years ago, I designed an intraweb site to track the production of client reports, (data collection, proofing, printing of each report etc…). The thing is I wasn’t a web developer but I knew Excel very well. So I mocked up the interface for the web pages in Excel spreadsheets. Since these pages were often data intensive, with many tables, this turned out to be very practical.

If you are interested, I have posted an example of one of these pages here: http://mulbrandon.com/control_intraweb/images/AnalystHP.gif

When I finally showed the project manager printouts of these designs she assumed they were actual web pages.

I once spent several days creating an excelsheet that solves sudoku puzzles…. wonder how’s that going to bring us closer to world peace huh.

It worked, but as I wanted to be able to solve the very diffucult sudokus (the ones with four extra squares within the standard nine that also should be filled out by using every number once) I ended up with a 20x30 feet matrix :-) But it works.

At this moment I run a soccer prediction game for a group of friends that stretches across the entire soccer season. Noticed the limitations of excel: it only has about 400 columns…. yes I’m a nerd.

Dennis

EXCEL makes and excellent wedding planner!

My wife and I recently used it to track Wedding To-Dos, invitations lists, budget (plan vs actual), RSVPs, and general notetaking.

Using the Conditional Formatting option is a nice way to have items show up with colors baed on the cell entry eg. Complete in the Status column turns Green.

I suppose this becomes even more interesting with the release of

http://spreadsheets.google.com/

Will the use of this newest google Labs tool be included in the article? Is there some organisational strategy I can take advantage of a universally accessible spreadsheet? I haven’t come up with any yet, but given some time…

Mine maybe similar to what Beth said earlier so I’ll have to follow up on her reference. I did my own Excel workbook to track my running. Each sheet covers a year to log the number of days and miles run. I have from 2000 through 2006 currently so I can review charts on days, or miles, or avg/miles per day. Separate sheets track race results, 5K, avg mile pace per race, etc. Not terribly geeking but effective.

I experimentally discovered the 256 column limit in Excel when I was calculating all the forces in a 5-bar mechanism (2 linked 4-bars). When I was done, I had 107 columns by 390 rows of data (with 7 columns of labels and 18 rows of input data) on my main calculation sheet. I had a total of 4 data sheets and 21 graph sheets (each of which had an average of 8 data series). That spreadsheet was cool because it started from first principles, like the weight and center of gravity of what we were lifting.

I’ve used Excel to plot the deformation of an object. You take the X,Y position of a point on the object, find the dX and dY deflection of that point, multiply those by a scale factor (so you can see microscopic delfection), and add those magnified deflections to the X,Y positions. Repeat for the entire object, then plot those points with a scatter graph. Adjust the scales of your graphs so that a circle looks round. (I print on 8.5x11, so I make sure that the ratio of the scales is close to 8.5:11.) Voila, a visualization of your deformed widget. If you plot the original X,Y points on the same sheet, you’ll get a nice comparison.

These guys have figured out how to quickly see your data without a complicated graph which is seperated from the data: in-cell graphing. You put a bar-graph in the cell next to the data with the =rept() function.

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=236 http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=239 http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=240

Yeah, just search for “excel” at Juice Analytics, they’ve got some great stuff.

File this one under the nerdy/obsessive category: I use Excel to plan my monthly downloads from eMusic — http://emusic.com

eMusic (for those who don’t know) is an online retailer who sells music on a subscription basis. I have the basic plan that allows me to download 40 songs per month.

So, I use Excel to keep track of all the albums and EPs (plus individual songs) that I want to download and the number of songs on each. Then I run through the list each month and use Excel to figure out how many songs I would use up by downloading various combinations of albums, EPs and singles.

Nerdiness: I track scrabble scores for family games on Excel. During the game it’s convenient because you can easily see the total and the average points per move and a graphical trend of points per person as the game has progressed. With wireless in the house we can then alt+tab to the official scrabble dictionary for challenges. After the game we can then compare the trends to previous games.

I also used it to count calories and track my weight, for which it worked wonders. Although, I was a skinny dude, so I used to ensure my weight was going UP as planned. There were clear correlations in the slope of my weight plot and days when I slacked off in terms of calories.

I also use excel to track my workouts. I have a different tab for each muscle group that I work (upper body, arms, legs, trunk, aerobics, etc. etc.).

I loved Amy’s idea. Amy, you are gonna make some movie geek a great wife/partner! I’m also seeing commercials for movies I want to see but can never remember them when it comes time to go or rent.

I work for an internal corporate agency and we had a guy from our finance department come to us with a newsletter he’d put together. He needed us to jazz it up a bit and get it proofed. We were incredulous when we discovered he’d done the whole thing in Excel.

My husband keeps track of all of the Veronica Mars episodes TiVo has recorded for him on his Excel spreadsheet. I thought that was pretty darn geeky. But I recently found that he’s done something even nerdier than that. He used Excel to help him rank and prioritize all of the Twilight Zone disks on the basis of things like how many good episodes are on each disk, which ones have “classic” episodes, best-known actors, etc. The purpose was to help him put them in the most ideal order in his Netflix queue. Geek me out the door.

Excel helped me name our second child. The spreadsheet included both of our first and middle name preferences (prioritized), displayed all combinations so we could narrow the list down to a reasonable 10, and mixed and matched those finalists with our first child’s name, based on the following criteria: - how the first and last name sounds like together (most common usage) - how the first, middle and last name sounds (used when the bugger gets into trouble) - what the initials are (with a name like Brian Samson, it’s obvious my parents didn’t think of this one) - how the sound of the first name goes with our first son’s first name

Each of the above metrics had a score, a relative value of importance for each metric, and a response for each criterion from both her and I. Aggregating the sum-product of the relative values and the responses yielded a quantitatively accurate, preferred name from both her and my perspectives. A little fancy AI and the answer was magically displayed.

We looked at the screen, ignored the results and went with our guts. Who would name their child “#N/A #NAME? Samson” anyway?