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What do you use Numbers/Excel for?
- Thread starter bigMAC28
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For me, reconciling receipts with my monthly bank statements. That helps for tracking expenses for any write-offs/business deductions for income taxes during tax season. add 'em up for each type of expense I have, apply the total to the appropriate field when doing my taxes, and I'm done.
BL.
BL.
Keeping track of and manipulating data for scientific work is probably #1.
#2 is keeping student grades.
#3 is for personal, hobby related records. I have excel sheets that list items and serial numbers in my various collections. For my watches, I have lines where I input current gold and silver values to calculate the melt value of items. For reloading ammunition, I keep track of the actual powder throws(and standard deviations) for various powders for my powder measure.
Excel is an extremely powerful program, and I think a lot of people barely scratch the surface of the capabilities of Excel. In particular, for scientific stuff I make use of the statistics functions-which can all be done in a spreadsheet. The chart functions are incredibly useful for displaying data, and it's super easy to do things like set up error bars. For many instruments, I can retrieve the data in a .csv file, which is an ASCII spreadsheet, and then again do things like normalizing the data, doing statistics, and plotting.
For keeping track of grades, setting up formulas that will turn my random point values into an actual, meaningful grade is a huge time saver, especially since once I write the formula I can apply it to several hundred grades at a time. Once that's done, I can run the statistics to determine things like grade cut-offs. If I have a "dropped" grade(depending on the class) I can write a formula to automatically deduct the lowest value from the total. My university uses a package called Blackboard for electronic student communication. In the grade center in Blackboard, I can download a .csv of roster, assignments, and current values then reconcile that with my excel sheet and upload it back to Blackboard-again a huge timesaver.
I use Excel quite literally on a daily basis-it's a program that's pretty much always open on my computer, and often with multiple sheets open. Once you really get into the "meat" of realizing what it can do, you can pretty much find a use for it for everything.
#2 is keeping student grades.
#3 is for personal, hobby related records. I have excel sheets that list items and serial numbers in my various collections. For my watches, I have lines where I input current gold and silver values to calculate the melt value of items. For reloading ammunition, I keep track of the actual powder throws(and standard deviations) for various powders for my powder measure.
Excel is an extremely powerful program, and I think a lot of people barely scratch the surface of the capabilities of Excel. In particular, for scientific stuff I make use of the statistics functions-which can all be done in a spreadsheet. The chart functions are incredibly useful for displaying data, and it's super easy to do things like set up error bars. For many instruments, I can retrieve the data in a .csv file, which is an ASCII spreadsheet, and then again do things like normalizing the data, doing statistics, and plotting.
For keeping track of grades, setting up formulas that will turn my random point values into an actual, meaningful grade is a huge time saver, especially since once I write the formula I can apply it to several hundred grades at a time. Once that's done, I can run the statistics to determine things like grade cut-offs. If I have a "dropped" grade(depending on the class) I can write a formula to automatically deduct the lowest value from the total. My university uses a package called Blackboard for electronic student communication. In the grade center in Blackboard, I can download a .csv of roster, assignments, and current values then reconcile that with my excel sheet and upload it back to Blackboard-again a huge timesaver.
I use Excel quite literally on a daily basis-it's a program that's pretty much always open on my computer, and often with multiple sheets open. Once you really get into the "meat" of realizing what it can do, you can pretty much find a use for it for everything.
Side note: if you want a nice way to do quick calcs, that keeps a running history of values (as well as save the entire "sheet"), use results in other calcs, I use Soulver, keep it open 99% of the time.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/soulver/id413965349?mt=12
$11.99, but you can catch it on sale pretty often.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/soulver/id413965349?mt=12
$11.99, but you can catch it on sale pretty often.
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Inventory, inventory, inventory: fabrics, battings, pillow forms, threads, needles, pins, cutting blades, patterns, templates, pens, pencils, paper goods (archival tissue, sketch, foundation piecing etc), reference books and magazines, locations of block designs or resizings, etc., all that STUFF about which I prefer to minimize rude surprises when possible.
Each category has its own details so they're separate sheets. Only fabrics and battings get hooked up to projects, usually. although sometimes a book, magazine, pattern or block design could be referenced by a project's documentaiton.
Documentation of projects - photo ref#, type, name, description, size, status, dates, where is it, do i still own it etc, and then references to the fabrics used, with photo references back to the inventory sheet references.
Grocery tracking of items I commonly buy - to figure out when what’s on sale is actually a sale price, and to maintain awareness of approximate inventory on things I don’t want to run out of in winter. I like to stock up by November and then only shop for perishables from then until March!
Budgets, and investments if there’s something left over after Apple!
Inventory of software purchases, vendor, license info etc. I usually do clean installs of a new OS so this is handy for that and for setting up a new machine.
inventory of my Apple gear - type, nickname, model info, color, capacity etc, what i paid, where i got it, new/refurb or whatever, all the serial numbers and etc IDs, when the applecare runs out, whom I gave it to if not now mine and so forth
Metadata for some parts of my music libraries, easy to work on it in a spreadsheet because I can massage a lot of stuff more easily that way than any other homebrew way like just text docs.
Anything else that when I go to do it, feels like it belongs in a spreadsheet rather than text doc. Easy enough to swap it out if I was wrong. Other way, not always so simple.
Each category has its own details so they're separate sheets. Only fabrics and battings get hooked up to projects, usually. although sometimes a book, magazine, pattern or block design could be referenced by a project's documentaiton.
Documentation of projects - photo ref#, type, name, description, size, status, dates, where is it, do i still own it etc, and then references to the fabrics used, with photo references back to the inventory sheet references.
Grocery tracking of items I commonly buy - to figure out when what’s on sale is actually a sale price, and to maintain awareness of approximate inventory on things I don’t want to run out of in winter. I like to stock up by November and then only shop for perishables from then until March!
Budgets, and investments if there’s something left over after Apple!
Inventory of software purchases, vendor, license info etc. I usually do clean installs of a new OS so this is handy for that and for setting up a new machine.
inventory of my Apple gear - type, nickname, model info, color, capacity etc, what i paid, where i got it, new/refurb or whatever, all the serial numbers and etc IDs, when the applecare runs out, whom I gave it to if not now mine and so forth
Metadata for some parts of my music libraries, easy to work on it in a spreadsheet because I can massage a lot of stuff more easily that way than any other homebrew way like just text docs.
Anything else that when I go to do it, feels like it belongs in a spreadsheet rather than text doc. Easy enough to swap it out if I was wrong. Other way, not always so simple.
I use Excel probably 90% of the time. Pivot tables! I also do a lot of financial modeling and I hate how Numbers autosaves everything. I can pump numbers into Excel, change them, experiment, and then just close it if I want and my original model is still there. With Numbers, I always have to remember to do anything in a copy, and then Save As the original file.
I've run businesses on Excel, I've used t to plan holidays. Its so versatile. Don't make the mistake of being limited by what YOU can think of to use it for...