Lets keep away from professional job related spreadsheets and focus on spreadsheets created for personal use.
I have two:
- Spreadsheet to track my income and expenses each month.
- Spreadsheet for my workout routine to track my progress.
Not totally created from scratch, but I adapted one from NaNoWriMo to track my writing progress year round – time per day, words per day, that sort of thing.
I also make a spreadsheet each project – mostly I use it to track plotty stuff through a book scene by scene: how many words, whose POV, which plot/subplot it belongs to, where recurring themes/motifs show up, plus structural points like where the Inciting incident occurs, where the acts break, at what point the climax falls, that stuff.
Oh, and I later use the scene info to decide where to break chapters. (My mind doesn’t naturally work in chapters as units.(
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Mileage for my car.
It has the date, tripmeter miles driven, number of gallons to fill the tank, calculated MPG (miles/actual gallons), indicated MPG (what the car says I’m getting), the percent error between the actual and calculated MPG, and the average error. Currently my average from Sept. 2013 to now is 44.22 MPG, with an average calculated vs. indicated error of 3.51% (i.e., the car is 3.51% more optimistic than the calculation).
Personal investments and financial status spreadsheet. Also a stock investment spreadsheet, and a Schedule D spreadsheet for taxes.
A spreadsheet for annual home maintenance repairs and capital improvements.
A home inventory spreadsheet for insurance purposes.
I have a spreadsheet of days I have migraine.
I have one to keep track of my inventory, aquisitions, and occasional sales for my rare perfumes collection.
I recently set up a spreadsheet to log my daily music practice time. I reached out for help here.
I wrote one to record gas fillups and my mileage. I imported it into Google sheets and use on my phone.
I have my music book collection in a Spreadsheet. It includes the songs in each book. Makes it simple to locate a song that I want to scan and learn.
I’ve thought about importing the music book sheet into Access. But there’s no advantage to that. Search is extremely easy in Excel and the sheet does what I need.
This is a great idea. I’m sure I’ll never get around to doing it, but it’s a great idea.
mmm
Just bunches!
My writing is all catalogued, and broken down into a master table (titles) and a sub-table (submissions…and rejections. I have a nice rejection-slip collection.)
Within my writing, I keep a page-per-day journal. Again with a master-and-subtable format.
Ditto for my music collection. Master table is albums, and subtable is songs (“pieces of music,” more formally, as I’m a classical music fan.)
My blood pressure log.
And I keep track of books in series. I just started reading the Arsenne Lupin books and stories by Maurice LeBlanc (free on Project Gutenberg) and use a spreadsheet to keep track of which ones I’ve read.
I tried using MS Access for this, and failed miserably. I just couldn’t figure out how to create, link, and use tables in Access. Excel is vastly more user-friendly than Access, which is a mean, nasty, evil, vicious monster of an application.
For the group of guys I golfed with I had one that calculated the moving average handicap of each player vs the other player in each permutation. It weighted more recent to rounds more heavily than older ones, tracked putts, greens in reg, drives. Helped handicap our betting.
I have one that manually recalcs my taxes so I can adjust withholdings throughout the year.
I had one that calced build cycle times for Warcraft 2 to optimize rush build orders using old mpq data files back in 95 
I track some stats on the SDMB too.
I really only use three:
1)Quicken (at home) and Quickbooks at work. In the end they are just really complex spreadsheets, but that probably doesn’t count.
2)Also in the doesn’t count category is list of all my passwords. Using a spreadsheet makes it a ton easier to keep usernames, passwords, websites etc all in nice columns as they need to updated, without spacing and tabs getting all out of whack.
But the real one, while actually for work, is one I created. Each day I get boat loads of numbers. How much money we took in from all the different departments in out store, how much we brought in via wholesale to other businesses, how much catering we did etc. I also have to know how much we paid out in cash as the day when on. Did someone need to get gas, did someone have to pay the guy that delivers this or that COD. On top of all that, how was all this money brought in? How much was cash? Checks? EBT (food stamps), visa, MC etc?
Lastly…how much do I put in a bank and drive to the bank and what numbers do I input into the computer to keep all of this BS organized?
Well, I have a spreadsheet.
I enter all that stuff, it does all the math and at the bottom right is a nice column of number that basically works out to “Enter these numbers into the computer” and “Take this much money to the bank”.
Before I was there, they had something very similar, but all the calculations were done by hand so it was very simple. My method allows us to keep track of a lot more detail since it’s so easily expandable.
My rental buildings expenses
I had one for tracking my golf handicap, but I gave up on that a few years ago. Half the time I play these days I don’t even keep score. I just like to go out and make shots.
When I was training for the Ironman, I had one to keep track of my key training times, how I did in the races leading up to the “big event” against others my age/size, and then how I ranked by various groupings once I finished the whole thing.
I have one to keep track of my stock purchases and sales, and one for tracking my net worth.
I have one for tracking my heart rate and blood pressure, started when I found out I had AFib, and am on medication to control that. I had my heart set back in “good rhythm” a month or two ago, and I can tell just by the heart rate whether or not it’s staying there (50 bpm after procedure vs 80 bpm before). Love seeing the low numbers every week!
I did one for our investment portfolio some years ago. Did two years with a column for changes, esp. showing the increase in net worth.
Mrs. FtG loves it so much she keeps updating it each year. (It had finally convinced her that we were definitely not going to starve to death.)
But there’s a big problem: stuff got moved around, some accounts got merged, etc. So the summary part is out of whack. I see no need to fix that since there’s going to be more and more of that and the “fixing” will never end and will never be actually meaningful.
I’ve also done spreadsheets for test calculations and to see what certain tables of data would look like.
I have a spreadsheet I made years ago, for my video collection. When I made it, it was actually easier to browse through the shelves. [The eventual] Mrs. L.A. moved in, and put half of my videos in baskets (because they’re prettier than exposed videos) and made me move the rest out of the living room. So now I wouldn’t be able to find a particular vid even if I looked it up on the spreadsheet. And of course, it’s now years out of date anyway.
I’ve got a spreedsheet for crafty expenses, which is actually heavy on what fiber I’ve spun into yarn this year, as well as how much I’ve spent on it.
I’ve got a spreadsheet to keep track of my spreadsheets.
I have a spreadsheet for my grocery list. I have all the standard stuff on it that I keep in stock at home or use frequently for my favorite recipes. Staples like flour, sugar, milk, eggs, etc. plus the usual fruits and veggies, canned food, dog food, everything. When I’m preparing to go shopping, I open the spreadsheet up, delete the items I don’t need to buy this time, adjust the quantity on stuff I need, and add any additional items. Print it (or save with a new name) and go. I have a ‘location’ column so after adding new items I can sort the whole list by location (produce, dairy, canned, breads, etc) so that when I’m at the store I don’t have to do any backtracking.
‘To Do’ lists for house and yard projects, with materials, costs, time, dates
Monthly Budget
Death Pool list, with categories for DoB, why they’re famous, known illnesses, etc.
Dinner Ideas - recipes I think my family might like, with a link, or the name pf the cookbook. Sometimes I generate a random number and use that to pick what we are having for dinner tonight.
D&D characters - Excel is useful for keeping things lined up
Packing lists for camping trips and other holiday travel.
Christmas - pages for menu, shopping lists, presents, to-do list, timetable.
I used to have a groceries list, but now have a phone app.
Used to have a weight loss one, with a graph.
Back in the late 80s to early 90s I ran the company football pool for a league with about 100 players. To be eligible for the yearly prizes for top 3 players by percentage you had to play at least 14 of the 17 weeks but to encourage people to play every week we had a rule that if you didn’t miss any weeks you could drop your lowest weekly score by percentage.
I wrote a spreadsheet that produced a standings table to be posted on bulletin boards around the company. When calculating the percentage correct to date for each player it determined if that player had played every week and if so what the lowest percentage week was and dropped it from the calculation. This was actually a pretty tricky calculation to do with Excel 2.0 (released 1987) and I was pretty proud of it.
There were a couple small yearly prizes for the person with the best and worst single weeks scores and the “most consistent” player (person with the smallest standard deviation) so it had to identify and highlight those as well.