I know how wierd it sounds to say “I love spreadsheets!”. I mean, you don’t hear people saying things like “I love Word documents!”, or, “I love JPEGS!” do you?!
Just mentioning Excel, spreadsheets or workbooks is often enough to send most people to sleep. If they do manage to stay awake, they’ll want to change the topic of conversation. Although, if their only experience with spreadsheets is what we were taught at school, I’d be the same so I totally get it.
So, what do I see that others don’t? Well, for one, I see the world as a very complicated and disorganised place. There’s so much happening at once and spreadsheets help us to create some form of order.
What can spreadsheets be used for?
Spreadsheets can be used for a huge range of things. Let’s start with money.
We get paid monthly / four-weekly / weekly or even sporadically. From that, we pay our key bills. These include things like rent / mortgage, energy, entertainment, etc. Then, if we’re lucky enough to have much left, we should decide how much to save. Finally, we decide how much we’ll spend on going out, clothes, treats etc. This doesn’t include sporadic spends like car maintenance, holidays and unexpected expenses. How on Earth do people organise their finances without a spreadsheet?
I expect that, in many cases, the answer to that is they either don’t plan, or they spend ages writing stuff out on paper.
Spreadsheets can be used to break down spend into months and / or categories and more. Once your spends are listed, automatic calculations can be made. You could, for example, calculate how much you’re expecting to have left after your key bills. You could plan longer and see what you’ll have at the end of the year if you reduced the spend on your entertainment package by 20%.
So, just money tracking then?
Absolutely not. That’s just one example. Things like To Do lists, business plans, buy / sell projects and all kinds of trackers can be done very well on a spreadsheet. Even basic microcontroller projects can be configured to record data onto a csv file which is pretty much a spreadsheet (another topic for another day!).
Ultimately, in my mind, they’re used to organise chaos. A tornado of information is organised into rows, columns and sheets and suddenly, the world makes sense again.
Spreadsheets do more than just help people to organise their information. They enable automated calculations, allow you to sort your To Do list into order of priority and they even let you highlight values in different ways depending on what they contain.
Okay, we’re talking basic stuff here. The more advanced user can use spreadsheets to automatically retrieve data from the internet to perform calculations and serious analytical deep dives into the data held.
Sounds kind of interesting, how do I do this?
With this being a passion of mine, albeit a weird one, I’ll share some simple and easy to follow guides to help you make practical spreadsheets of your own. I’ll also offer downloads to the completed projects, but, if you’re visiting a project blog like this, you’re probably more interested in learning to do it yourself and make your own.
It’d be great to see some comments around what you use spreadsheets for, what application you use to create / edit them and what related projects you might like to see.
Thanks for reading!
