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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?

Mitch Silverman's picture

I spent most of a...

I spent most of a day and a half modifying a VBScript I got from the Lifehacker blog that now creates and formats a new Excel time log file every day and updates it every time it's run. The XLS this VBScript produces computes the duration of each entry, sums the total duration, and supplies the appropriate column headers and so forth.

I run it as a Windows scheduled task every 15 minutes and as a keyboard macro. The modified VBScript is available at http://www.agman.us/xlsQuickLogger.mlsilverman.vbs. It's freely distributable, licensed under the GPL. The Lifehacker post that tells you how to make it run as a scheduled task and also how to make it run from your keyboard is http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--quicklog-your-work-day-189772.php (it's also in the comments). Look at the VBScript to see what to change, though -- you need to change the filepath variable, not the filename.

 
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