A few years ago I made a spreadsheet to track how much the neighbor’s dog barked. Kept notation for two weeks, then confronted him with it (I’d already spoken to him twice about it). 
Most recently, I made a spreadsheet that calculated the stats of every possible driver/gear combo in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and lets you filter/sort based on those stats. For example, if you want at least 3.25 acceleration, you’ll maximize your other stats with Wario on a standard bike with standard tires. (Whether you get the Plane Glider or the Super Glider depends on whether you prefer weight or traction, respectively. )
I’m just happy to get the ones with formulas to actually work. Everything else is pretty basic though some are color coded with nifty fonts.
I’d say. Especially if they do not know of each other. 
Same here. I’ve never seen any point in making things “pretty.” A big table with all the needed data is all I want.
(Actually, the data itself is kind of “pretty” in an abstract philosophical sense.)
I do sometimes restrict cells to data choices – “yes/no” boxes, as one example, or “two letter abbreviations of US states” as another. But that goes to data integrity more than aesthetics.
Heavens, this can be a looooong list. Some highlights:
Budget
Stock/mutual fund comparisons
Grocery list (organized by aisle!)
Gantt charts/schedules for innumerable projects
My daughters Iowa Skills Test Results, updated yearly
Oscar Best Picture nominee revenue and profit tracker (started a few years ago to settle an argument on the SDMB, kept it updated, done for every picture nominated for BP since 1927-28.)
Tracking quarterly Z1 Fed Reserve #'s from Truman-current, seeing how US National Net Worth changed throughout Presidencies
Christmas Card and mailing lists
A spreadsheet I put together to track 5 years of financial transactions for our HoA when that couple stole almost $18k from us last fall. 7 tabs.
I put my cells in boxes, make bold column headers, even coloring and shading. Find this makes later referencing MUCH easier.
Gadzukes, a bunch of them, a whole folder. All Excel workbooks.
One workbook where I keep track of my available annual leave, so I can budget for future vacations. Also keep track of our checking/savings accounts, and all of our retirement and non-retirement investments, which we update every couple of months.
Payment series for car/house loans. The latter has been handy for refinancing, so we can see what our monthly payments would be at various interest rates.
Monte Carlo simulations to understand what our nest egg might amount to a couple of decades from now under various investment and market scenarios. Literally “might,” as in we end up with a histogram of possible nest egg values, so we can assess probabilities of hitting our target or falling short. I recently flipped this around and used it to convince my elderly parents that they would very probably not run out of money before they die.
Various budget spreadsheets. What if my wife loses her job? What if I scrap my side job? Will we still be able to pay the bills?
Tax withholding calculator. After doing my income taxes, I want to adjust our withholdings so we end up with at least as much withheld as this year’s taxes, guaranteeing no underpayment penalty.
I actually ran the Monty Hall problem in a discrete form (as in choose this door or that door 10,000 times) to verify what the actual probability of winning would be.
A simulator of my motorcycle’s performance. Torque curve, gear and final drive ratios, estimates of driveline friction, trying to see how close I could get the simulator to published 0-60 times. Was entertaining to understand the effect of changing the shift points, length of time taken for each shift, and so on.
Artillery shell simulation, incorporating supersonic/subsonic drag. Just like you can step your finances forward one month or one day at a time, this thing steps forward a fraction of a second at a time. Used it to estimate the behavior of military artillery, as well as potatoes from a potato gun.
A spreadsheet of standard atmosphere properties from the bottom of the Tautona mine (a couple of miles below sea level) to an altitude of several hundred thousand feet. Includes pressure, temperature and density at 100’ intervals. Handy for other stuff, including the aforementioned artillery shell simulation.
Sunrise/sunset calculator. Input latitude/longitude, and it tells you the sunrise/sunset/twilight times for all 365 days.
A machine screw thread model incorporating friction. It allows you to see how the affect of even modest friction in the threads completely overwhelms the effect of thread pitch, so you can understand why a 1/4-20 screw and a 1/4-28 screw have pretty much the same torque-versus-tension relationship.
A bunch of other random little calculations to answer idle curiosity. stupid stuff like…how fast does a motorcycle have to travel in order to be able to hold air in the tires (40 psi at the tread) without a valve core? Answer: ~3000 MPH.
I thought I’d be the biggest spreadsheet dork in this thread…I shouldn’t have worried.
In Excel (on my local hard drive):[ul]
[li]A workbook called “Stuff” with tabs for[/li][LIST]
[li]my budget[/li][li]notes about property tax amounts and recurring debit/credit card charges[/li][li]magazine and online subscriptions[/li][li]my salaries (since 1998)[/li][li]every job I’ve ever had (PT/FT/intern)[/li][li]every volunteer position I’ve ever had[/li][li]my periods (since 1998)[/li][li]info associated with moving (costs and who to notify; I move a lot)[/li][/ul]
[li]A list of every movie and TV show I’ve purchased, and whether it’s on DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes, or Amazon. [/li][li]An old mailing list for my jazz gigs (now I pretty much use Facebook events).[/li][li]Set lists for my jazz gigs.[/li][li]A weight tracker.[/li][li]A simple monthly calendar for printing and putting on the fridge, that tells me which days my dog gets her pill (every other day; I’d never keep it straight my own).[/li][li]A “Christmas” workbook that tracks who I sent Christmas cards to and who I got them from, and also any gifts that I gave/received that year (since 1997).[/li][/LIST]
In Google Docs:[ul]
[li]Every movie I’ve seen in a theater.[/li][li]Gadgets I own and when I purchased them.[/li][li]Blood pressure and blood sugar/A1C numbers.[/li][li]A few simple recipes.[/li][/ul]
I have long thought about creating an index for my sheet music/charts/lead sheets, but each time I start I find the task simply too tedious. One of these days…
I used to have an awesome Google spreadsheet that included everything I might ever get from the store, in aisle order, with a column where I’d enter a “y” if I needed it. When it was time to shop, I’d simply filter on the “needed” column so that only the “y” items showed up; as I added things to my cart, I’d delete the “y.” It was a beautiful and perfect system, until one day a couple of years ago when Google suddenly took away the ability to use filters on mobile devices*. My amazing shopping list was suddenly useless. :mad: I’ve never been able to find a shopping app with exactly the functionality and interface that I want, so I started using a simple note app on my phone.
*This post prompted me to check, and apparently Google has restored that functionality! Yay! Now I’m used to using my phone’s app, but maybe someday I’ll re-create my shopping spreadsheet.
5 related to my Crayola Crayons collection.
One for my pedal car collection.
One of every Monopoly tokens ever made, designed or otherwise pictured.
One for tracking my Ebay listings.
One tracking my charitable donations for my 2017 tax return.
One of all 3142 songs I have on my computer.
An old spreadsheet of the spousal support payments I made to my ex. She still thinks I shorted her even though the spreadsheet documents every payment made to her.
[ul]
[li]My workout schedule[/li][li]My kids’ high school and college grades and GPAs[/li][li]The height and weight of my kids as they grew up, including graphs[/li][li]Gas and electricity cost and usage for year-over-year comparisons. I have also imported weather data to correlate usage against heating- and cooling-degree-days[/li][li]My guitar practice routine (no calculations but it’s a nice way to organize it)[/li][li]My kids’ 529 college savings accounts expenditures[/li][li]A tool to compare my checkbook record from Quicken to the bank statements when they don’t reconcile[/li][li]A workbook for travel that includes:[/li][LIST]
[li]A packing checklist, with dynamic rows that are shown for specific types of trips (foreign travel, hiking trips, bicycling trips, trips during the school year, etc.). [/li][li]A currency conversion sheet that downloads the latest rates from the web[/li][li]A conversion sheet for Fahrenheit to Celsius, and from English to metric for volume, distance, weight, and $-per-gallon to foreign-currency-per-liter.[/li][li]A checklist of all pre-trip preparations[/li][li]A list of all frequent flyer, hotel memberships, and Global Entry numbers[/li][/ul]
[/LIST]
I have advanced expertise in macros and often incorporate those.
Those are just the ones I use regularly. There are countless other ad hoc files.
This thread has featured many spreadsheets I would love to have a copy of. Some, to study how they are designed, and some for the data content. I’d really love to see the content of this one!
Since it’s unreasonable to ask that you file-share it, I just gotta ask one question: how many? How many Monopoly tokens are in your list?
I’d take my hat off to you…but it’s sitting on Ventnor Avenue right now!
Budget. I’m not saying I necessarily stick to my budget, but on paper, we can easily cover our expenditures with our income.
My daughter’s wedding expenses, timeline, and guest list
Capital Improvement list and project cost
Vacation itinerary and costs
Mortgage and HELOC payoff schedules, so I can add in additional payments and see how much money I save!
E-money, which I get through my advisor, is great for keeping track of our net worth. It also has a feature where I can enter in our projected retirement age, etc to see if we’ve fully funded our retirement account.
Made some to track investments, to track my bicycling mileage, and one scorekeeping spreadsheet for a fantasy sumo game I developed.
[quote=“Misnomer, post:48, topic:790270”]
[li]my periods (since 1998)[/li][/QUOTE]
Any interesting patterns arise from that data? Do you look back and go “oh, I was under a lot of stress that spring, that’s why the timing was erratic”, or that sort of thing?
Another spreadsheet I forgot about:
a Doppler-shift chart. If you’ve got a musical ear and can discern the relative pitch as a vehicle comes toward you and then away from you, the chart will tell you how fast the vehicle is moving.
Actually, it shows how very regular I was up until perimenopause began. I no longer remember what prompted me to start tracking it!
I’ve got an interesting one. When I was younger, I made a spreadsheet of all the women I’ve had crushes on, and rated them based on my degrees of physical, emotional, and intellectual attraction to each, plus the quality of our platonic friendship (if any) and any perceived reciprocal interest. Then I then attempted to subjectively give them an overall score (1 to 100) of how interested I was in them, overall, and weighted each of the other categories until the calculated scores lined up (across the rows) with my subjective scores. I couldn’t math, so I suppose that was a primitive attempt at a multivariate regression analysis.
It’s been a while, but I learned a bit about myself from that inexperience… namely that physical attraction and intelligence were way more important to overall desire than friendship, emotional attraction, and reciprocity. Also that the scores and weightings changed over time.
Though it may have seemed like an experiment in objectification, it was meant more of a way for me to quantify the nuances of interpersonal relationships, having had insufficient practice with humans in real life.
I have to admit I still think this is a good idea. I bet most people (at least when they’re younger) don’t actually want what they think they want, and an objective statistical analysis of their preferences could form a great matchmaking app…
I have many, I love analyzing data, but my favorite is my 401k calculator. It contains year end actuals since inception and a forecast of the year end balance for each year over the next 20 or so. Past years show actual rate of return results and future years are forecast based on lower than expected returns, market average returns, and higher than expected returns. I can easily perform “what if” analysis and it can even give me projected balances after I begin withdrawing funds. It’s a nifty tool to see when I can really retire based on what income level the fund can provide at any given level of withdrawal over any given span of years.
The plan is to retire when I can replace a minimum of 80% of my current income via 401k withdrawals and Social Security.
My checkbook has been replaced by a simple spreadsheet.
I have one at work that keeps track of my leave balances and pension projections and 401k balances and retirement countdown.
One I saw the other day: My brother-in-law, on the side, makes sports brochures for local high schools, with information like rosters, schedules, and records all put together in a pretty glossy package. We were over at their place yesterday, and I saw him working on one. He agreed that something like Pagemaker was probably the right tool for the job, but he already knows Excel, so that’s what he uses.
I start teaching the Excel portion of my Microsoft Office class tomorrow, so this thread was very helpful and timely. I’ve compiled the list of these ideas, without any information revealing the poster, and removed the duplicates. Of course this is as a spreadsheet.
So far there have been 129 mostly unique uses reported here. I’m sure my students, who have little- to no knowledge of spreadsheets, will find this useful and interesting. Thank you!