Career By Design

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Every year, I have an ice fishing spreadsheet that gets reused to estimate ice thickness based on a two-week lookahead weather forecast.  

Starting around Thanksgiving (and earlier, if the evidence supports it), there's a high-low forecast entry for weather, and columns for notes on the local lakes (they freeze in a sequential order).  Once a lake is noted as partially frozen over, the forecast is used to estimate when there will be walkable ice (4" thick), ATV-supporting ice (6-8" thick), or truck-supporting ice (12"+).  Once a week, the update includes a review of the actual high-low temperatures from the week prior and any updates to the future forecast.  

Haven't gone through the ice yet from it.  

Some years, I've been out fishing as soon as November 10, and one year had only 10 days of walkable ice all winter.  

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Like William, I once created a spreadsheet to rank my favorite music (I did albums rather than songs). I created 7 ranking categories and scored all of the albums on my short list from 1 - 10 in each category. I only populated one category per day and hid all of the other categories to try to eliminate any bias. It gave me the wrong answer, but it was a fun exercise, anyway!

I also once created a spreadsheet to track the accuracy of weather forecasting where I lived at the time. It turned out that over the course of about half a year, the forecasted temperature 10 days out was, on the average, more accurate that the forecasted temperature 8 or 9 days out.

I also use Excel every year at Thanksgiving (more as a graphical interface than a spreadsheet) to keep track of when every dish needs to go into or out of the oven or on the stove. Dinner has only been late once in the last 5 years!

Every year, I have an ice fishing spreadsheet that gets reused to estimate ice thickness based on a two-week lookahead weather forecast.  

Starting around Thanksgiving (and earlier, if the evidence supports it), there's a high-low forecast entry for weather, and columns for notes on the local lakes (they freeze in a sequential order).  Once a lake is noted as partially frozen over, the forecast is used to estimate when there will be walkable ice (4" thick), ATV-supporting ice (6-8" thick), or truck-supporting ice (12"+).  Once a week, the update includes a review of the actual high-low temperatures from the week prior and any updates to the future forecast.  

Haven't gone through the ice yet from it.  

Some years, I've been out fishing as soon as November 10, and one year had only 10 days of walkable ice all winter.  

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Every year, I have an ice fishing spreadsheet that gets reused to estimate ice thickness based on a two-week lookahead weather forecast.  

Starting around Thanksgiving (and earlier, if the evidence supports it), there's a high-low forecast entry for weather, and columns for notes on the local lakes (they freeze in a sequential order).  Once a lake is noted as partially frozen over, the forecast is used to estimate when there will be walkable ice (4" thick), ATV-supporting ice (6-8" thick), or truck-supporting ice (12"+).  Once a week, the update includes a review of the actual high-low temperatures from the week prior and any updates to the future forecast.  

Haven't gone through the ice yet from it.  

Some years, I've been out fishing as soon as November 10, and one year had only 10 days of walkable ice all winter.  

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Thats awesome. I love a good sport spreadsheet. I've been meaning to start a spreadsheet for surfing that compares predicted "good" days against actual reality at a given beach that day. Thank you for sharing!

Every year, I have an ice fishing spreadsheet that gets reused to estimate ice thickness based on a two-week lookahead weather forecast.  

Starting around Thanksgiving (and earlier, if the evidence supports it), there's a high-low forecast entry for weather, and columns for notes on the local lakes (they freeze in a sequential order).  Once a lake is noted as partially frozen over, the forecast is used to estimate when there will be walkable ice (4" thick), ATV-supporting ice (6-8" thick), or truck-supporting ice (12"+).  Once a week, the update includes a review of the actual high-low temperatures from the week prior and any updates to the future forecast.  

Haven't gone through the ice yet from it.  

Some years, I've been out fishing as soon as November 10, and one year had only 10 days of walkable ice all winter.  

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Wonderful question, Chris. May I offer two?

My first (pre-software) was hand-written on a columnar pad listing the pros and cons of marrying my fiancé soon or after college. Ranking weighted priorities provided the push we needed to marry soon. Sixty years later, we suspect the spreadsheet gave us good advice.

A more recent attempt listed my favorite tunes/songs. Striving for a top 10, the spreadsheet quickly grew to 268 items. Sigh. Considering only candidates for a top 10 provided a top 58. Ranked choice voting narrowed it to these 22:

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Not a spreadsheet of mine but one my CE father made. He was working for a railroad that consistently had discussions with locals and environmental groups about vegetation removal efforts. One day reading our local paper, he read an article about goats being used to clear vegetation. It has enough data points in the article about herd size, duration of vegetation removal, and area completed that he could try to estimate the number of "goat days" to clear the entire railroad RoW. Given the cold climate where we lived, there were not enough "goat days" to make it a viable option for them and he had the numbers to back it up. 

Still makes me laugh. 

Wonderful question, Chris. May I offer two?

My first (pre-software) was hand-written on a columnar pad listing the pros and cons of marrying my fiancé soon or after college. Ranking weighted priorities provided the push we needed to marry soon. Sixty years later, we suspect the spreadsheet gave us good advice.

A more recent attempt listed my favorite tunes/songs. Striving for a top 10, the spreadsheet quickly grew to 268 items. Sigh. Considering only candidates for a top 10 provided a top 58. Ranked choice voting narrowed it to these 22:

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Not a spreadsheet of mine but one my CE father made. He was working for a railroad that consistently had discussions with locals and environmental groups about vegetation removal efforts. One day reading our local paper, he read an article about goats being used to clear vegetation. It has enough data points in the article about herd size, duration of vegetation removal, and area completed that he could try to estimate the number of "goat days" to clear the entire railroad RoW. Given the cold climate where we lived, there were not enough "goat days" to make it a viable option for them and he had the numbers to back it up. 

Still makes me laugh. 

Wonderful question, Chris. May I offer two?

My first (pre-software) was hand-written on a columnar pad listing the pros and cons of marrying my fiancé soon or after college. Ranking weighted priorities provided the push we needed to marry soon. Sixty years later, we suspect the spreadsheet gave us good advice.

A more recent attempt listed my favorite tunes/songs. Striving for a top 10, the spreadsheet quickly grew to 268 items. Sigh. Considering only candidates for a top 10 provided a top 58. Ranked choice voting narrowed it to these 22:

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Wonderful question, Chris. May I offer two?

My first (pre-software) was hand-written on a columnar pad listing the pros and cons of marrying my fiancé soon or after college. Ranking weighted priorities provided the push we needed to marry soon. Sixty years later, we suspect the spreadsheet gave us good advice.

A more recent attempt listed my favorite tunes/songs. Striving for a top 10, the spreadsheet quickly grew to 268 items. Sigh. Considering only candidates for a top 10 provided a top 58. Ranked choice voting narrowed it to these 22:

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

One of the weirdest (but surprisingly useful) spreadsheets I've made was a long-term repair and maintenance cost tracker for industrial and electrical equipment.

It looked simple at first, but over time it turned into a living document where I tracked repair frequency, cost deviations, failure patterns, and how "temporary fixes" quietly turned into permanent solutions.

The funny part? The spreadsheet eventually started predicting which equipment would fail next better than some official schedules.

Not weird on the surface - but a little unsettling when Excel starts behaving like a crystal ball 😄

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

You all seem to make incredibly advanced works.  
but I have to give myself some confidence as being a solopreneur since grade school.  My parents were divided from each other.
I conceived of a few principles of food economics, and was restricted in a target to find a workplace, such as a student frequenting a coffee shop to work, while being cordial and meeting others.  My incentive was vegetarianism vs. any meat, generally only chicken as diet, and seeing that there was a relationship to mileage, but also to the types of thoughts I could emit to others and some aberrations depending on how many people were in proximity.  This was influenced by having visited East Asia India and arriving at a state to know my parents had lived in the Indus Valley, and visited other countries.  You see I was from a bicycle town in N. California…. The experiment has been realizing there is a balance of our intellects with the foods we eat , the proximity we are to others (or the distance) and travel heeding energy consumption for travel.  The spreadsheet included all my consumption receipts, fuel to mileage records with maps directions mileage.

; and generally included the intellectual work scope that I was able to complete.  
How much violence?  How much peacefulness?

How much consumption?  How far?

Quality of work ?  A bean counter to conceptualize the differences between countries with fewer people vs countries that have very high population Density, to begin to understand why religion/social order is present as it is in ea. Country.

One of the weirdest (but surprisingly useful) spreadsheets I've made was a long-term repair and maintenance cost tracker for industrial and electrical equipment.

It looked simple at first, but over time it turned into a living document where I tracked repair frequency, cost deviations, failure patterns, and how "temporary fixes" quietly turned into permanent solutions.

The funny part? The spreadsheet eventually started predicting which equipment would fail next better than some official schedules.

Not weird on the surface - but a little unsettling when Excel starts behaving like a crystal ball 😄

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

That's an amazing example, Refugio. It took a lot of effort to figure out those parameters and how to combine them.

Thanks for sharing it.

Bill Mc

You all seem to make incredibly advanced works.  
but I have to give myself some confidence as being a solopreneur since grade school.  My parents were divided from each other.
I conceived of a few principles of food economics, and was restricted in a target to find a workplace, such as a student frequenting a coffee shop to work, while being cordial and meeting others.  My incentive was vegetarianism vs. any meat, generally only chicken as diet, and seeing that there was a relationship to mileage, but also to the types of thoughts I could emit to others and some aberrations depending on how many people were in proximity.  This was influenced by having visited East Asia India and arriving at a state to know my parents had lived in the Indus Valley, and visited other countries.  You see I was from a bicycle town in N. California…. The experiment has been realizing there is a balance of our intellects with the foods we eat , the proximity we are to others (or the distance) and travel heeding energy consumption for travel.  The spreadsheet included all my consumption receipts, fuel to mileage records with maps directions mileage.

; and generally included the intellectual work scope that I was able to complete.  
How much violence?  How much peacefulness?

How much consumption?  How far?

Quality of work ?  A bean counter to conceptualize the differences between countries with fewer people vs countries that have very high population Density, to begin to understand why religion/social order is present as it is in ea. Country.

One of the weirdest (but surprisingly useful) spreadsheets I've made was a long-term repair and maintenance cost tracker for industrial and electrical equipment.

It looked simple at first, but over time it turned into a living document where I tracked repair frequency, cost deviations, failure patterns, and how "temporary fixes" quietly turned into permanent solutions.

The funny part? The spreadsheet eventually started predicting which equipment would fail next better than some official schedules.

Not weird on the surface - but a little unsettling when Excel starts behaving like a crystal ball 😄

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

That sounds cool and really complicated to a non-structural person like me, Abubakr. How did you test it to be sure it consistently provided correct answers?

Bill Mc

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

That sounds cool and really complicated to a non-structural person like me, Abubakr. How did you test it to be sure it consistently provided correct answers?

Bill Mc

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

Abubakr: It sounds as if you have designed the perfect approach to ensure that your spreadsheet produces correct results. When I worked for the Corps of Engineers we used a very similar technique for our TABS suite of open channel flow and sediment transport models. We employed a large number of standard tests to ensure that model upgrades and patches didn't compromise the models' ability to correctly solve the equations of motion. In the modern vernacular, it's called verification. A large number of tests were required to test all the possible loops and routines in thousands of lines of Fortran code. Then for each project application we compared the results to observed (hindcast) data and evaluated them for reasonableness in a process we now call validation.

Thanks for posting.

Bill Mc

That sounds cool and really complicated to a non-structural person like me, Abubakr. How did you test it to be sure it consistently provided correct answers?

Bill Mc

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?

That sounds cool and really complicated to a non-structural person like me, Abubakr. How did you test it to be sure it consistently provided correct answers?

Bill Mc

A friend recently told me he might need to start a list of... all the dead people he knows.
Dark? Yes.
Organized? Also yes.

That got me thinking about some of the more fun spreadsheets I've made over the years.

One of my personal favorites:
I ranked the food I ordered through the Too Good To Go food waste app. (If you don't use this app yet, consider checking it out.)

Since you never really know what you're going to get, I started tracking the following stats from each food place I'd use the app at:

• What I paid

• What I received

• My perceived value of the haul

• Whether I'd order from that place again

After a few orders, I basically had a data-driven leaderboard of surprise leftovers.

What's the weirdest, funniest, or most unexpected spreadsheet you've ever made?