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Open Thread: How are you using Excel?
Merlin Mann | Aug 22 2006
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? 119 Comments
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 Excel helped me name our...Submitted by Brian Samson (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 4:02pm.
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? » POSTED IN:
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