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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?

doinkman's picture

This geek is an environmental...

This geek is an environmental engineer and I use Excel A LOT!

One example was to create a 20-year life cycle analysis of cogeneration systems at wastewater plant. You entered any manor of economic and scientific design criteri; interest / inflation rates, capital costs, utility costs, labor costs, equip efficiencies, heat available, and on and on. From there I could chart different alternatives and concepts against one another over a 20-year time period. Took maybe 40 hrs from scratch, which is pretty incredible considering I've used in several other projects since.

The most complicated sheet I've ever saw was a Activated Sludge Model that simulates a biological system, in various reactors based on different scenarios.

I also used it to geekily plan my wedding / recttion including: mail merge, resort comparsion, tracked wedding reception responses, and now I have a sheet with what everybody gave so we know what to give back.

 
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