Spreadsheets for fun?

Christina Beargie · April 2020

One of the tasks from my big list of "I'll do this someday" is creating some really in-depth analysis of our visitation and ticket sales trends, with pretty graphs, year-to-year comparisons, etc. I've done some basic work on it for a couple events as needed for reporting, but always meant to create something better. I love data, but just haven't had the time to put a lot of effort into it.

Now that I'm working from home, I've really been diving into this. In fact, I've had to limit how much I work on it at once, so I don't finish it too "early" in this stay-at-home period. I reward myself for getting other work done by spending time on this.

So my question is... does anyone else like doing stuff like this for fun? It feels a bit funny to think "YES, I finally get to work on that spreadsheet!", but it's true! I've found some fascinating things now that I've looked at our data in different ways, and I think we can leverage that information for our marketing and member communications. Neat-o!

Beth Hudson · April 2020

Oh girl, I love a good spreadsheet! I recently started a spreadsheet that I have been wanting to do for some time. It's a personal use one to track books read. I read a lot! I like to track what books, authors, number of pages, my personal rating, dates read, etc. I also use Good Reads for tracking but wanted a spreadsheet so I could manipulate the data to suit me.

Regina Holten · April 2020

I NEED to spread sheet. I know BASICS only. And I'd been wanting to up my excel (is that a good program) game - especially when it comes to some magic I witnessed once ... produced by a PIVOT table! love that word. Anyway, likely I'll dive in somehow - suggestions on a start?

Elizabeth Perron · April 2020

I enjoy a good spreadsheet too!

My favorite ways to learn are youtube and downloading excel templates, then trying to reuse them. It can be frustrating, but when I think how do I get X to change to X, I just type my question into the help search area to learn something new.

Pivot table video I usedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0wI61ahfLc

Happy organizing your thoughts!

Morgan Kunze · April 2020

Spreadsheets are definitely addictive, and there's always more to learn! Regina Holten‍, I feel like Excel is the gold standard but I find that Google Sheets is actually pretty great, too. I don't think Sheets offers as many high-level tricks as Excel but they have a lot of the basic functions and seem to be able to intelligently anticipate what I'm trying to do (like, the other day I started to type a text-to-columns function and it just understood that I was separating first names from last names and DID it. Excel would have made me type it all out and then accused me of making a syntax error). Plus Sheets is eminently share-able, which is nice, and all of the sheets I created in the office last month followed me home in the cloud, thank heavens.

A couple of years ago I saw a presentation by this guy, and some of the tricks he taught us blew my mind. His style might not be for everyone, but it's certainly a change of pace in terms of tech tutorials.

In other spreadsheet-nerd news, conditional formatting is my favorite trick. I love it.

Dan Whisenhunt · April 2020

I'm new to the community. Kindly tell me the biggest "win" you have had by being a member of the community.

Regina Holten · April 2020

Thanks so much for the tips! I'm...well, up in my late 40's and always thought MUST LEARN MORE ABOUT EXCEL...we have hired some younger people and they are introducing me to google sheets and ... what? google forms!!!! they definitely looked like they were kinder about text in a sheet....mind was blown on that one...AND THANK YOU AGAIN...will explore!

Beth Hudson · April 2020

The biggest win is the network of users in similar industries. Being able to come to the community for answers to everything from "how do I run this query to get the answer I need?" to "what are you doing in reaction to Covid-19?" is so valuable!

And I have to say I really enjoy the fun stuff, especially the ninja training. ?

Patti Hommes · April 2020

Morgan Kunze‍ thanks for hooking us up with "this guy"!! I'm pretty good at Excel, but there's always something new to learn, Xlookup?? Who knew? ?

Aldera Chisholm · April 2020

If anyone is seeking a bit of a level up on Excel, your local library is likely to have some free online classes. (Library shout out!) Gale, Lynda are both good ones to start with. Regina Holten‍ once learn to love a pivot table, it's life changing, haha. My org works in Google Office so Sheets is our default, but I still prefer Excel for a few reasons.

And really if you google "how do I do X in Excel" you will probably find 5 immediate solutions - which is a lifesaver for finding formulas for things you don't do often.

Katie Cagney · April 2020

I think excel skills are a really underrated resource! For a start there's those simple formulae that save you hours of work (I love concatenate, vlookup, left, right, trim and proper) Then there's tricks like pivot tables and adding data entry forms for users..

I think the trick is not to download a massive 'how to do excel file' and make it feel heavy but to play around with some data (copy it first) and see what you can create - and google for solutions, there's some really creative ways around things out there!

It's okay to have your favourite excel projects right? I have a couple

Spreadsheets for fun?

Comments

Categories