Do you use spreadsheets (Excel)?
Those who do, LOVE them. I use spreadsheets all the damn time and I definitely love them.
Most people, however, open up the application, see all of the little boxes and their brains explode. I get it, I do. And then you hear eveyone babble about formulas and suddenly we're jettisoned back to Algebra 1 and any remaining gray matter melts into goo.
The other day I posted about using cameras and encouraged to PLAY with something you're not familiar with like all of the different settings on the dial. PLAY is definitely in order when it comes to spreadsheets. Yes, you can do some awesome formulas. If there is a geek in the crowd I could brag about my embedded concatenate inside a triple if/then statement - I've shown this puppy to pros and they are amazed. But for the beginner just using the list feature is pretty damn awesome.
Yesterday the latest batch of Oscar nominees was announced. I watched with my Oscar spreadsheet open, ready to add the newest titles.
hmmm... look at that, in red I added formulas at the top. It totals the number of titles, how many I've seen and then other stuff. I'm a junkie, what can I say?
I started using color coding to indicate which ones I've seen. My goal, of course, is to eventually see all of them. Currently I've only hit 38% of the titles. TCM is helping me knock out the really old ones.
Usually I like to alphabetize my lists, but this one I felt it was better if kept in order by year. Using a spreadsheet means I'm not restricted to one set up. I can resort them by title and then go back to the year or I can find all of the ones I like and do a secondary sort by title. Spreadsheets mean I can CHANGE MY MIND. Oh how I love that flexibility because this girl does a lot of mind changing.
Because one list was not enough, there are tabs at the bottom (not pictured) where you can add new sheets which is like a new page or document. Using formulas you can link and cross reference between these tabs. I have one where I track nurse visits for an entire year and then on a cover page take the totals for each year so I can have a multi-year summary to hand off to the executive team at work. For my Oscar chart I have a second sheet where I track the nominees for best actor/supporting actor/actress/supporting actress.
I'm always editing my list. It started off with title, year, and a box to mark if I'd seen it. That wasn't good enough, oh no, no, no.... I needed to track WHEN I saw it, my assessment of the movie (like, don't like, was it good enough in my book to be nominated) and then I kept forgetting what the movie was about so I tossed in a blurb about content. Sometimes that blurb is film critic, sometimes it's just a quick synopsis.
Yes, all of this could be done in word processing, but it takes a lot of tweeking to add or modify. So much so, that it's almost prohibitive.
A few years ago I learned you can also use spreadsheets to make forms. This is an intermediate level way to use the application. You have to be able to resize the boxes (cells) and know how to merge boxes together. I've done a ton of forms this way. I've had to reproduce forms created by other agencies and I'm able to replicate them almost identically. It's important to know how to make a check box using the wingdings font to do this. I'm pretty sure that tidbit has just made someone out there dangerous.
I challenge you to give it a try. Feel free to hit me with questions, I'll give personal tutorials FOR FREE. I love this application and want to convert the whole world into honoring the glory of spreadsheets.
