Microsoft Excel presents itself to most users as a business tool, not something they would use in their daily lives, and that’s a shame, because the spreadsheet program’s power goes far beyond mere number manipulation. Here are some smart things you can do with Excel around the house:
keep score – Anytime you have a game that lasts longer than one night (my husband and I have had some epically long Boggle competitions), Excel is exactly the right tool to keep track of the results – the spreadsheet format not only It easily keeps the numbers where they belong, but when the game is finally over, you can print a line graph showing your progress to victory mapped right on top of your partner’s progress to ultimate defeat.
Collection Tracking -I’m a huge fan of collectibles, whether it’s a geeky trading card game or a more serious philatelic pursuit. Excel gives you the ability to list not only the quantities of various items, but also the qualities, and makes sorting by quality as easy as “Sort by ‘Mint/New/Used'”.
Planning – Excel spreadsheets are great programmers. For example: scheduling your kids’ homework, color-coding it so they have no excuses for not knowing what their homework is, and actually printing the sheets out and posting them on the fridge with a marker nearby for easy marking. Excel makes it easy.
Organizing your spice rack – My husband and I have one of those revolving spice racks that holds 10 bottles per side on all four sides. When we realized we didn’t particularly care for “pizza seasoning” because we always blended our own spices, we discarded half the spices on the shelf and then made an excel spreadsheet listing all the spices and spice mixes. which we used most often. , hide the rows that contained the ones we use the least, and alphabetize the remaining 40 and sort them alphabetically on the shelf. We keep the spreadsheet in case there is any confusion about what is supposed to be where.
budget – Obviously, Excel is a great tool to keep track of the household budget. Labeling of expenses with labels such as “food (home)”, “food (out)”, “entertainment”, “clothing”, etc. makes it easy to not only rank by those values, but also create charts that show you how much of your monthly money is going to places that could be cut in a heartbeat.
School projects – Just when I graduated from college, my husband used Excel to graph various science projects. With Excel’s ability to reference other sheets in formulas, even highly complex information can be neatly summarized on the first sheet of a multi-sheet data matrix.
purchase decisions – When you have choices like trying to decide where to buy vitamins (where each store sells different amounts of pills at different prices and in different strengths), you basically MUST have Excel to make the most informed buying decision. . There is no other way to order so much data.
food diaries – When you’re dieting, whether you’re tracking calories, carbs, or fat grams, it’s key to be able to put the data in one consistent, organized place. Excel gives you that place, as well as tools to easily summarize your daily totals and chart your progress over time.
Make a channel guide – My husband and I switched to digital cable a while back, and the number of channels we had to deal with was phenomenal. By putting them all in Excel, color-coding them according to the approximate genre each channel consisted of, and highlighting the ones we watched the most, we were able to put together our favorites list without losing track of the more obscure channels along the way.
Conditioner Comparison – I once had a favorite conditioner, and then they changed the formula and it stopped working for me. The solution? I tried a dozen different conditioners, put all the ingredients from each bottle into excel, and then removed the ingredients from each bottle that didn’t work until I had a small list of ingredients that were shared among the few bottles that did work. Then i went and found the least expensive conditioner that shared those ingredients, and now i have a new favorite conditioner.
camping trip planning – When you have a limited number of slots and need to make sure everything goes smoothly, Excel is a great tool. List everything you need, where you can put it, and print two copies, one in alphabetical order so you can check it off to make sure you have it all before you leave the house, and one sorted by the “where is” column so you can find anything efficiently once you’ve hit the road.
Of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other uses for Excel around the house; this is barely scratching the surface. If you have hobbies like playing poker, Excel’s hypergeometric distribution function can tell you about the chance of getting a particular card in your next draw. If you’re into gardening, Excel can record temperature data for the past few years and give you an idea of when what is safe to plant. The possibilities are endless.
