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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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 I have a few spreadsheets...Submitted by don (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 4:58am.
I have a few spreadsheets that I keep open. First is a to-do list spreadsheet. I keep projects organized by due date and broken down into manageable chunks. I then do a simple formula that divides the number of days until the due date by the number of chunks and tells me how much I need to do on that project today to meet the due date. Second is the spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my progress on my novel. It then calculates my completion date based on when I'd be done if I wrote 1500 words per day (my platonic ideal which I have yet to achieve), if I wrote the amount that I wrote today every day, and the average per day since I started keeping track (including 0s for the days that I didn't write at all). It averages those to give me the ECD that appears on my blog at the end of each entry. I also set goals for the day based on my previous average writing, what it will take to be finished by year's end, and what it will take to hit 50,000 words by the end of October (so that when I do the 50,000 word sprint in November for NaNoWriMo, I can finish at that point). » POSTED IN:
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