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Open Thread: How are you using Excel?
Merlin Mann | Aug 22 2006
Yesterday, I mentioned I'd been talking with someone who's looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I'll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto's Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA. So, by request -- and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article -- I hope you all will jump in here: What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What's the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program? 119 Comments
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 Oh a couple of nerdy...Submitted by Adam (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 5:41am.
Oh a couple of nerdy things apart from the ordinary to-do-list & excercis/weight-loss stuff. Gambling 1: For creating a basis for my horse-race betting. Copy-pasting statistics from web-pages then with a sequence of re-sorting and reshuffling operation I created a cross-referenced table to find horses with "goog" odds. Gambling 2: A later variation of this is my own C++ program that does the x-ref stuff but I still use Excell to format the output for printing. Gambling 3: Ripping a large volume of horse race stats off the web and using the Excel-graphs to find correlations between odds and probabilities. Number Theory: I am really fascinated by prime-factorization. I have used excel search for patterns in two-dimensional arrays of numbers. A mathematical breaktrough is highly unlikely but still it is fun. Chess: For a while I printed empty template grids where I could record my chess-games, with a pencil. Project Management: A manager here uses excel with extensive scripting to create something like six-dimensional arrays (date, expected cost, real cost, person, client, task type ) for project management and follow-up. With graphing and what-nots on top. » POSTED IN:
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