{"id":330,"date":"2023-02-02T13:12:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/?p=330"},"modified":"2023-02-01T21:44:28","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T21:44:28","slug":"ive-excelled-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/2023\/02\/02\/ive-excelled-myself\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve Excelled Myself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I want to talk to you about spreadsheets.<\/p>\n

The first spreadsheet I can remember using was, I think, Lotus123. This ran on a DOS PC in the back room of a shop in Southampton where I worked for a year or two before beginning my software career, and it was used to gather the sales figures and send them to head office. I remember the workflow was somewhat dull and grim, the cause of a certain amount of swearing \u2013 but that\u2019s probably unsurprising. Software in 1988 had a long way to climb before it became truly user-friendly. But even back then, I could see the potential embodied in the idea of calculations that could flow around a table, magically providing answers.<\/p>\n

These days I\u2019m an old hand at Excel, and I often say that I think it\u2019s the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft. I’ve tried Apple’s Numbers, but it just doesn’t have anything like the same look and feel and I keep getting the suspicion that it’s trying to sabotage me, make me wear a suit and force me to do Keynote presentations instead.<\/p>\n

I struggle to imagine organising my life without Excel, and it\u2019s become a sort of extension of my brain. Here are some of the things I\u2019m currently doing with it:<\/p>\n

Expense Records<\/h4>\n

I keep a record of everything I\u2019ve spent for over twenty years on writing, music and photography. There\u2019s no real purpose to this, since I don\u2019t run any of those as a business (yet). I just like to know how much my hobbies cost me.<\/p>\n

Electricity Readings<\/h4>\n

I live in a farmhouse and have two meters. One is for the house and the other is for an outbuilding where I keep (and charge) my car. This spreadsheet allows me to enter the readings each month and immediately see a detailed prediction of the next bill so I can budget for it.<\/p>\n

Bedding by Temperature Range<\/h4>\n

For over a year, I\u2019ve noted the forecast minimum and maximum temperatures each night (with wind chill), the rough amount of wind and rain on a subjective scale of 0 to 5, various factors that could affect my sleep quality such as eating late, alcohol, whether I feel unwell, etc. I then note a number of facts about what I do to keep warm that night – which duvets, blankets etc. are on the bed? Am I wearing thermals? A hat? Even a dressing gown? It gets pretty cold here. The next morning, I enter an assessment of how well I slept, so that I can match them up. Now that I have a year of this data, I can look at the forecast for the night, and decide<\/em> on the blankets, thermals, hat etc. that I need, rather than just logging what I guessed. I do this by finding a similar night in the past when I slept very well, and copying the configuration.<\/p>\n

Car Mileage<\/h4>\n

I have a limited-mileage lease for my car. So every Sunday I enter the mileage, and I see a graph of the five years, with a line that I need to stay beneath (see image). It\u2019s currently way under where it could be, which is good!<\/p>\n

Date Reminder<\/h4>\n

Keeps me on track remembering birthdays and anniversaries. It can highlight special birthdays in green, warn me when I need to buy a card, take into account the days needed for posting and even add extra for weekends. I\u2019ve used this one for decades now.<\/p>\n

Christmas Card List<\/h4>\n

Tracks all the cards I send, and allows me to keep addresses up to date, sort by category (family, friends etc.) for batched processing.<\/p>\n

Time Sheets for work<\/h4>\n

I make a new copy of this each month, and I\u2019ve been using the same spreadsheet since about 1997, adapting it and tweaking as I go. Since in that time I\u2019ve flipped from contractor to employee and back again, working for various companies, features have been added for a large variety of reasons. As a result, this is the most complex spreadsheet I use. The things it does are way too numerous to list here, but it\u2019s so powerful that it\u2019s almost like having a dedicated piece of software for tracking my work and holiday time. My employer uses Atlassian JIRA and Tempo and in theory I could just use those, but there\u2019s a certain advantage to having a familiar tool that has evolved and grown with you over decades. Even though I end up manually transferring the time logged into Tempo, I still prefer having the control the Excel workbook gives me over planning and analysis.<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/h3>\n

What\u2019s interesting about the use cases above is that there is more than one dimension to them. Some are more calculation-oriented, while others are chiefly databases. But in almost all cases, it\u2019s not entirely one or the other. This is what spreadsheets have given us: the ability to externalise and extend both our short term working memory and our computational skills. They are literally our mental sidekicks. Like a posthuman remembering its former primitive human brain, I wouldn\u2019t want to go back to doing without them because it would feel like becoming stupid again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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