Open Thread: How are you using Excel?

Yesterday, I mentioned I’d been talking with someone who’s looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I’ll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto’s Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA.

So, by request – and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article – I hope you all will jump in here: 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?

My other half's an accountant...

My other half’s an accountant and he’s received CVs in Excel format before - just goes to show that people who rely on Excel use it for everything.

And when I used to work at Amazon I built a series of templates that when populated could be used to squirt out a whole page worth of XML in one go and with a fraction of the effort of using an XML editor!