I’ve written before about how I keep a ton of lists for various things in my life, but I don’t think I’ve written before about how much I absolutely adore Excel and spreadsheets in general. I’ll admit, I always kind of thought this was a weird “me” thing, but I’ve seen a lot lately in social media and commenters here from other women who all love a good spreadsheet… so if this is you as well, let’s share some of our tricks and tips, as well as some of the weird things we keep in spreadsheet form.
(I fully admit this may be a part and parcel of my ADHD – is there any better way to procrastinate than jumping into action and creating a good spreadsheet? I think not.)
I will note that I am not an Excel expert by any means, despite using it daily — it’s such a powerful program and has so many cool functions. I worked with Excel twice in my legal career in ways that really made it clear that I had barely scratched the surface of the program — once for a reinsurance dispute involving, if memory serves, fraud and theft from one of the brokers, so we were trying to figure out insurance tiers and percentages after the fact (whee). The second time was a few years later, when I inherited a 50-state survey on libel that involved crazy macros… it felt like I broke the chart more often than I got it to work right.
Still: it’s kind of surprising to me how often I have Excel sheets open on my computer, so I thought it would be fun to discuss the ways we use spreadsheets for personal use.
Do you use spreadsheets to keep track of personal data? What do you keep track of — and are you Team Excel, Team Google Sheets, Team AirTable (or other, or all)?!
How I Use Excel for Personal Stuff
I’ve written about some of these personal spreadsheets in depth before…
Health stats spreadsheet. I keep track of my health stats in spreadsheet form, guided primarily by an old Real Simple article I read years ago that went through the important stats to pay attention to. I’ve added some from an article I read with advice on perimenopause, and I’ll probably add some stats to track from the recent NYT article on ways to measure your fitness and health, apart from weight.
I don’t get all of the data every year — there are huge gaps in the spreadsheet, in fact! — but it helps me see general trends with the numbers that my doctors may be missing because they’re all in the normal range.
You can read more about my health stats and download my spreadsheet here.
Financial Snapshot spreadsheet. I first posted about this in our discussion on frugal fatigue, where you just feel a little burned out from saving so much — this is a great way to see major progress because you’re comparing snapshot overviews of your finances — it isn’t like logging into Mint or Quicken where you get the latest data but can’t necessarily compare it easily. I update my chart about twice a year.
I’ll be honest, the volatile stock market has hit us pretty hard so it’s been a little depressing to check the snapshot because it doesn’t look like we’re making a ton of growth… but even the slight growth makes me feel like we’re doing something right when so many of our investments are down, down, down.
You can read more about my spreadsheet and download a sample one here.
Kids’ Schedule spreadsheet. I’ve written about my Kids Schedule spreadsheet over at CorporetteMoms — I cannot take credit for this brilliant idea, but I use it every summer to plan summer camps for the kids. (If you’re scratching your head how this is possibly spreadsheet-worthy, I highly recommend this McSweeney’s article with word problems to help you design your summer camp schedule. Sample:
Your eight-year-old’s guitar camp, located five miles east of your house, starts at 8:45 AM. Your daughter’s robotics camp is seven miles southwest and begins at 9:30 AM with no early drop-off. You work ten miles north and have to be at work by 8 AM. How long will it take you to bend the time-space continuum?
How is it better than a regular calendar? It’s much more condensed, and the data is easier to consume — if I’m adding a description of a camp I can see it more easily — and if there are multiple weeks that they could take a camp I can see all of that data too.
You can read more about my method for scheduling kids’ activities and download my spreadsheet here.
Budget spreadsheets. We don’t currently really have a budget, but in the past when I’ve needed to really limit my spending I’ve been a fan of downloading expenditures into an Excel sheet and manually separating them so they’re in themed categories.
You can read more about my thoughts on how to make a budget here.
Rebalancing investments and assessing your asset allocation. I wrote about my attempts to rebalance our investments a few years ago… it can be trickier than you think! I have 3 different retirement accounts, my husband has 2, and we have 4 different after-tax investment accounts (not counting the kids’ 529s or their investment accounts). I tend to be super boring and invest in the same index funds, but because the investments are spread out over all those different accounts (and held in different banks and brokers!) it’s hard to get a handle on just where the money is allocated.
I wrote about different ways to assess asset allocation (small cap! large cap! foreign! bonds!) and some different services I’ve used to figure it out — but I keep a very rough spreadsheet of our allocations along with my financial snapshots.
My “first of month” spreadsheet. This is more a feature of my being self-employed with uneven income streams– on the first of every month I consult a spreadsheet to keep track of different bills like the electric bill and so forth, and I have calculations to figure out how much money I can move from my business to my personal account, and how much money I should put in my online savings for my eventual tax bill and for the eventual transfer to my retirement account. Then I have a calculation to figure out how much money I need to keep in our personal account, based on all the different automatic savings and automatic investments I have happening.
Yearly planner spreadsheet. I use this more for content planning than anything, but if you’re a Very Busy Executive with various conferences, speaking engagements, family vacations, and more to keep track of, this year-at-a-glance spreadsheet (auto download from MichaelHyatt.com) that automatically updates the dates can be a great thing.
Corporette analytics spreadsheet. Again, this is more a “me” thing, but every month I update analytics for the blogs like pageviews, followers, money, etc. I also have some SEO-related spreadsheets, but I’m more of a passive participant.
Tax stuff spreadsheets. Our taxes can be a bit complicated because I have a lot of different income streams and we take a fair number of deductions — for years I’ve kept a clean Excel chart of my Schedule C, essentially, listing all of my different sources of income. The tax planner my accountant gives me has last year’s data for reference, so I’ve done that also, although my Excel charts include all of the years. (But the printable version only shows last year as a comparable.) I really like having my data like this — it’s an easy way to compare different years and compare the income streams.
This year, frustrated by having my poor handwriting all over the place, I made three new charts to give my accountant, all inspired by pages in his tax planner — a list of my expenses broken down by category, a list of my charitable contributions, and a list of my dividend income. (My dividend income isn’t huge but reporting it requires a lot of data.)
I keep a few more spreadsheets in the cloud (Google Sheets and AirTable), but I vastly prefer Excel.
Readers, are you fans of Excel, or spreadsheets in general? How do you use them?
Stock photo via Deposit Photos / AndreyPopov.
Kat
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