How to Use Excel for Personal Items

I’ve written before 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 adore Excel and spreadsheets in general. I’ll admit, I’ve always thought this was a weird “me” thing, but lately I’ve seen a lot of commenters on social media and here from other women who love a good spreadsheet… so if that’s you, then here are some of our tricks and tips and some of the ones we keep in spreadsheet format. Let’s share the weird stuff.

(I fully admit that this may be part of my ADHD – what better way to procrastinate than to take action and create a good spreadsheet? I don’t think so.)

I will note that I am by no means an Excel expert, although I use it every day – it’s a very powerful program and it has many great functions. Twice in my legal career I’ve worked with Excel in ways that make it clear that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the program – once, if my memory is wrong, for a reinsurance dispute involving fraud and theft from one of the brokers, so we’re trying to find insurance tiers and percentages after the event (whee). Second, a few years later, when I inherited a 50-state survey with crazy macros on slander … I felt like I was messing up the table more often than when I was running it right.

Still: It’s a bit surprising to me that Excel sheets are open so often on my computer, so I thought it would be fun to discuss our ways of using spreadsheets for personal use.

Do you use spreadsheets to keep track of personal data? What are you following – and are you Team Excel, Team Google Sheets, Team AirTable (or others or all)?!

How Do I Use Excel for Personal Items?

I have written in depth about some of these personal paintings before…

Health statistics spreadsheet. I track my health stats in spreadsheet format, guided primarily by an old Real Simple article I read years ago that went through important statistics to watch out for. I’ve attached some from an article I read advice about perimenopauseand I’ll probably add some stats to watch from the latest NYT article. ways to measure your fitness and healthout of weight.

I don’t get all the data every year – in fact there are huge gaps in the spreadsheet! – but since they’re all in the normal range, it helps me see general trends in numbers that my doctors may have overlooked.

You can learn more about my health statistics and download my spreadsheet. Here.

Financial Snapshot spreadsheet. I originally posted this topic in our discussion on: frugal fatigue, where you’re feeling a little drained from saving too much – this is a great way to see big progress because you’re comparing instant overviews of your finances – it’s not like logging into Mint or Quicken where you get the latest data but you can’t necessarily compare easily. I update my chart about twice a year.

I’ll be honest, we were hit with the volatile stock market, so checking the snapshot was a bit depressing because we don’t seem to be posting tons of growth… we’re doing one thing right when most of our investments go down, down, down.

You can learn more about my spreadsheet and download a sample account. Here.

Kids Calendar spreadsheet. I wrote about me Kids Calendar spreadsheet At CorporetteMoms – I can’t give credit to this brilliant idea, but I use it to plan summer camps for kids every summer. (If you’re wondering how spreadsheet-friendly this is, I highly recommend it. McSweeney’s article with word problems to help you design your summer camp schedule. Example:

Your eight-year-old’s guitar camp, located 8 kilometers east of your home, starts at 8:45 am. Your daughter’s robotic camp is 11 miles southwest and starts at 9:30am 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?

What’s better than a regular calendar? It’s much denser and easier to consume data — I can see it more easily if I include a description of a camp — and I can see all that data if they have multiple weeks to camp. .

You can read more about my way to plan kids activities and download my spreadsheet here.

Budget spreadsheets. We don’t really have a budget right now, but in the past, when I really needed to limit my spending, I liked to download the spendings to an Excel sheet and manually sort them into themed categories.

You can read more about my thoughts. how to make a budget Here.

Rebalancing investments and evaluating your asset allocation. I wrote about my attempts rebalancing our investments a few years ago… it may be harder than you think! I have 3 different retirement accounts, my husband has 2 accounts, and we have 4 different after-tax investment accounts (not counting the children’s 529s or investment accounts). I tend to be very boring and invest in the same index funds, but since the investments are scattered across all these different accounts (and are held at different banks and brokers!) it’s hard to figure out exactly where the money is allocated.

I’ve written about the different ways to evaluate asset allocation (small equity! Big equity! Foreign! Bonds!) and some of the different services I use to figure this out – but I keep a very rough spreadsheet of our allocations with my financial snapshots.

My “first of the month” spreadsheet. This is more of a feature of me being self-employed with irregular income streams – electricity bill etc on the first day of each month. I can switch from my job to my personal account and how much money I need to deposit into my online savings for my final tax bill and ultimately a remittance to my retirement account. Then I have a calculation to figure out how much money I should keep in my personal account, based on all the different automatic savings and automatic investments I’ve made.

annual planner spreadsheet. I use this for content planning more than anything else, but if you’re a Very Busy Manager with various conferences, talks, family vacations and more to follow, this year’s spreadsheet at a glance (Auto download from MichaelHyatt.com) could be a cool thing that automatically updates the dates.

Corporette analytics spreadsheet. Again, it’s more of a “me” thing but every month for blogs you get pageviews, followers, money etc.

Tax spreadsheets. Our taxes can be a bit complicated because I have many different income streams and we take a decent number of deductions – for years I’ve kept a clean Excel spreadsheet of my Schedule C, essentially listing all my different income sources. . The tax planner my accountant gave me has last year’s data for reference, so I did that too, but my Excel charts include all the years. (But the printable version only shows the last year as comparable.) I really like having my data like this – it’s an easy way to compare different years and compare income streams.

This year, fed up with my bad handwriting being ubiquitous, I made three new charts to give to my accountant, all inspired by pages in the 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 it takes a lot of data to report.)

I keep a few other spreadsheets in the cloud (Google Sheets and AirTable), but I largely prefer Excel.

Readers, are you a fan of Excel or spreadsheet in general? How do you use them?

Stock photo via Deposit Photos / Andrey Popov.