Excel-erate your life

So, a few posts back, I posted here about how I posted on 43 Folders about my Excel spreadsheets (which I had previously blogged about here ) . . .

Anyhow, two interesting developments.

1. A friend's husband read my posts on 43 Folders and perused everyone else's posts to discover that one poster was a guy he used to work with.


2. When my friend e-mailed me about this Kevin Bacon moment, I remembered that the whole point of the thread was to help some newspaper reporter do research for her story. After some quick Googling, I found the piece and discovered that I was quoted in it. Yay!

Most Excel-literates are wary of becoming too obsessive. Christine Hall, my Toronto friend who uses Excel to plot her Christmas gift-giving, was thinking of opening a spreadsheet this week, but held off. "Starting this early makes it seem so much less heartfelt," she says. "If I do it now it's just 'getting the task done on time and on budget.'"

And the biggest Excel-literates admit their friends keep them from nerding out too severely. Amy writes to 43folders to say her "geekiness knows no bounds." She transcribes Entertainment Weekly's summer and fall movie previews into a spreadsheet, then ranks them in order of her desire to see them and uses a colour code to indicate whether she wants to pay full price or go on a discount night.

"I send the file to my friends so they can add their input in their respective columns, and then I use the information to plan out movie nights. To my friends' credit, they mock me mercilessly and don't actually fill out the chart, but I usually get enough general comments to determine what they feel like seeing."

But Mann says that once you're hooked, it doesn't matter what friends think. "What, I'm not going to use Excel because you think it's dorky?" he says.

So, go check it out:

Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life

by Tralee Pearce, Toronto Globe and Mail, 8/26/06