This is a guest post written by Joel Zaslofsky, author of Experience Curating.
How to Make “Put It in a Spreadsheet” Who You Are (and Not Just What You Do)
It seemed like a crazy question:
Could I use my passion for Excel as motivation to transform my leaky brain from a weakness into a strength?
Sure, I already had a fifteen year love affair going with Excel.
Every other email I sent to my co-workers had an attached Excel spreadsheet. And when I wasn’t using Excel for work purposes, I was using it for grocery list templates or budget tracking.
But I had to discover the answer to my crazy question.
So I told my wife Melinda in January 2012, “Honey, this is the year I put it in a spreadsheet!”
As I reveal in my article Spreadsheets and You, Melinda shot me a puzzled look. Was I joking? Should she ask me to elaborate?
She gingerly responded, “You’re going to put what in a spreadsheet?”
I shot her back a grin and said, “Everything!”
Experiences with videos, books, recipes, quotes, songs, online content, conversations, fleeting thoughts … everything. Little did I know that I was about to experience the gorgeous love child of curating and spreadsheets.
Hold on to your hat, my friend. You’re about to see how I use Excel to curate my entire existence. It’s something I call “Experience Curating,” and this is where things gets juicy.
The Power of Excel: Formulas and Numbers Optional
Wait a moment.
Isn’t there a Chandoo policy against publishing posts without awesome formulas or behind-the-scenes Excel strategies?
Fortunately, there isn’t (thanks, Chandoo!).
I respect my Excel-loving friends who can run VLOOKUP and macro circles around me. But unlike most people who use Excel for data analysis and number crunching, I enjoy it for the simplicity.
In fact, most of my spreadsheets have no formulas and some don’t even contain numbers.
Spreadsheets without formulas or numbers?! Blasphemy! Why even bother … right?
However, you probably know and love a few unconventional uses for Excel like creating role playing games or playing Super Mario World or Space Invaders. I just happen to know a lot of uncommon ways to use Excel with surprising results.
The most unconventional and best way I’ve tapped into Excel’s functionality has to be Experience Curating, though. In fact, it was so powerful that I spent a year writing a popular book about it.
Experience Curating is a three-part blueprint that empowers you to recognize, capture, organize, and share your most valuable moments. The first part builds the mindset that everything can be curated to benefit yourself and others. The second part integrates the six-step FAOCAS framework that makes any experience meaningful. And the last part applies the tools and best practices to grow actual curating currency.
I can’t convince you here that spending 0.1% of your time adding value to the other 99.9% through curating is worth it. And I can’t explore the nuances of the FAOCAS framework – Filter, Archive, Organize, Contextualize, Access, and Share – on Chandoo’s platform.
What I will do is show you how to use Excel to keep your most valuable experiences tidy, accessible, and sharable. What you use your curated experiences for – making money or personal finance mastery, improving your relationships, truly useful to-do lists, or world domination (for instance) – is up to you.
Using Excel to Curate (Even Excel Resources)
Since you like Chandoo, I assume you want to rock at Excel. Actually, I bet you’ve seen many Excel-related resources that you’d like to revisit or share with this community.
But it’s time to answer some tough questions like:
- Are you archiving those Excel-related blog posts, knowledge base articles, YouTube videos, and other experiences?
- Have you organized your Excel resources “experience elements” – the who, what, when, where, why, and how of an experience – in a logical and meaningful way?
- Did you preserve the context of the content creator and add your personal layers of valuable context?
- Can you access your Excel resources when, where, and how you want?
- Can you share your resources quickly and with attribution to the source?
It’s OK if you answered no to any of these questions. Follow these steps, or customize them for your unique needs, and you’ll be answering yes in no time.
- Define your curated spreadsheets’ goal(s): In this example, the goals of the spreadsheet are to capture, organize, preserve context, instantly access, and share (when necessary) your Excel-related resources.
- Determine how many worksheets you need. My default is just one worksheet so that I can quickly see, sort, and filter everything in one place. You, however, may want multiple tabs so you can do fancy formula and visualization stuff that I don’t even know about. The decision is up to you.
- Identify your sort and filter needs. Knowing how you want to sort and filter your workbook helps decide how many and what type of experience elements would be useful. Is sorting by tag or experience creator essential? Is filtering by resource topic category or subcategory important? Whatever column headers (a.k.a. experience elements) you need to slice and dice should be required columns. Everything else can be optional.
- Create a simple instruction manual. Each experience element should have a logical name, a clear purpose, pre-defined acceptable values (preferably with data validation), a realistic example, optional general notes, and be either required or optional. You don’t want to leave this critical foundation in your ever-changing memory or subject to interpretation. Fortunately, it’s easy to create an instruction manual in a separate worksheet. Check out my example if you want to see Experience Curating in action.
- Think about the visual formatting. My minimalist nature seeps into Excel as I use almost no color and little overall visual formatting. But I still contemplate the ideal margins, orientation, header, footer, print area, and printed paper size in case someone else might want a physical version. I also choose a column’s cell format (e.g., text, number, or date), font (I like 11 point Arial), and text alignment (e.g., wrapped or indented) that’s ideal for each experience element column.
- Create a pre-populated list of labels for your required experience elements. Each pre-populated list lets me turn off my brain and rely on a set of labels that I determined with intention. I especially like data validation here so I’m prevented from entering a label that’s not part of my pre-populated lists. As a best practice, I also add customized error messages that prompt me to use an existing label or add a new one to the pre-populated list.
There are tons of best practices around this process in Experience Curating, but these six steps will let you curate any combination of topic and medium in Excel.
If only the millions of Evernote or Facebook users knew what they were missing when they don’t use Excel to curate!
Excel + Experience Curating = Awesome
What Chandoo does with Excel is magical.
What a master curator like Robin Good does with Scoop.it, Zeef, or hundreds of other tools is inspiring.
Now imagine combining the best of Chandoo with the best of Robin Good.
That’s what Experience Curating is all about.
It takes little energy and time. And since you already have Excel, you have no extra investment to make.
Pick a single topic you like and start curating it in spreadsheets. In fact, I’ll make it easy on you. Here’s your first resource to put in your new spreadsheet … and it’s about spreadsheets: Skilledup’s 133 Excel Resources: Tutorials, Guides, Add-ins, Templates, & Courses.
Need to expand the combination of your curated topics and mediums beyond spreadsheets and Excel? Just use another Experience Curating template, the Curated Topics and Medium Tool Decision Grid.
Spend two minutes now to curate this post so you or someone else can benefit from it later. The proven process of the FAOCAS framework can help if you need it.
Your experiences don’t just happen to you. They can make big things happen for you.
Preferably in Excel, of course.
For the comments: What other ways do you know of to use Excel unconventionally? What tweaks would you make to the Experience Curating framework to make it even more valuable with Excel?
Added by Chandoo: Thank you Joel
Many thanks to Joel for writing this article and sharing an interesting & powerful way to use Excel to make ourselves smarter, better & more awesome. Exactly the kind of stuff that gets me excited.
If you enjoyed the article & want to put everything in Excel, take a minute and say thanks to Joel. Also, check out his book for understanding more about experience curating.
Note about the links to Joel’s book: I am using my amazon affiliate link for Joel’s book. That means Chandoo.org make a few cents, if you choose to purchase it thru my link. I genuinely like Joel’s book & I think you will enjoy it too. I would have recommended it even with out the affiliate link.
About the Author
Joel Zaslofsky is the creator and author of Experience Curating. When he’s not enjoying nature, working on his Smart and Simple Matters show, or chasing his sons around the house, he’s cranking out useful stuff at Value of Simple. Stop by to download the free tools that he and countless others use to simplify, organize, and be money wise.
28 Responses to “2010 Calendar – Excel Template [Downloads]”
[...] Download and print the calendars today. You can add notes to individual dates or complete … [...] Uni Ego / Free 2010 Calendar – Download and Print Year 2010 Calendar today [...]
Any chance on a 2016 calendar?
Afternoon,
I have one similar calander that I added conditional formatting to so that I could highlight any planned factory holidays. I think i "borrowed" the formula from another calander so I won't post it here.
I also added week numbers to it using the formula =WEEKNUM(MAX(C6:I6)) Where C6:I6 is the range of dates in that give week. It works fine on most of the months but return strange values on other months (Week 6 in October?) I can't see any logic behind why it does this.
Any suggestions for an alternative formula to give the week numbers?
Regards,
William
Hi Chandoo,
I've added a new feature on your spreadsheet.
This control can be useful for all the sheets where you need to check dates.
Cheers
http://cid-69a78592a23a8438.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/2010-calendar%5E_Miguel.xls
Hi Chandoo,
Nice calendar.
Till now whichever calendar I saw in Excel, it contained only the outline sheet.
Good to see monthly views and the mini view too.
Liked the mini view much. 🙂
-Nimesh
@William: This weeknum may be because the input dates to max are not properly formatting as excel dates.
Good tip on the conditional formatting and holidays btw...
@Migueal: Now that is super awesome. This is the reason why I love to blog. Readers will always one up me with such cool alternatives. Thank you for sharing this with us.
@Nimesh: You are welcome 🙂
is it possible to get the Notes section on the outline page to display the notes added to the month page for a specific date?
So if you add thing for January 2nd, and then select January 2nd those notes appear on the outline page
@Shish... You can do that using some formula magic. I would not recommend pushing excel to that as outlook / google calendar / icalc etc. do exactly that much more elegantly.
[...] Perpetual Excel Calendar – Free Downloadable Template [...]
Happy christmas to all of you!
This is really awesome. The nicest calender I've seen for Excel. I also like Miguels version of the sheet.
Just one "feature" is missing to me. As I live in Germany - where weeks start on Monday - I'd like to change this. Could someone please give me a hint how to do this?
Thanks in advance
Jörg
Hi Chandoo, I’ve added some new features on your spreadsheet with your permission.
Check it here:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Calendar%5E_Pedro.xlsm
Miguel, this calendar is translated to Spanish language.
Jörg, this new approach allows us to start weeks on Monday.
Also it's possible to start weeks on Sunday if you enable Excel macros and push the arrows.
Best Regards,
Pedro.
@Pedro.. superb stuff.. thanks for sharing the file with all of us.
Hi Chandoo, for dates before March 1, 1900 our calendars are wrong.
In Microsoft Excel, DATE, EOMONTH, WEEKDAY functions return an incorrect result between Monday, January 1, 1900 and Wednesday, February 28, 1900.
See this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214326/en-us/
Microsoft Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year in all Excel versions.
That's the reason why our calendar versions only work from March, 1, 1900 until December, 31, 9999.
Your comments are welcome.
Pedro.
@Pedro.. Thanks for pointing that out. wow... This reminds me of the Joel Spolsky's first BillG review - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html (read it, I am sure you would love it.) when Bill out of blue asks about date time implementations for VBA (which Joel is the program manager for...)
Thanks for sharing the URL too... Here is a specially made, chocolate sprinkled, extra fluffy donut for you 🙂
Hi Chandoo, thanks a lot for the donut but I prefer it without chocolate!
Always it's good to know a little history of Excel.
The Joel Spolsky’s last BillG Excel review was about the "Hall of Tortured Souls"
(See this Excel 95 Easter Egg here: http://www.eeggs.com/items/719.html)
Do not miss the humor!
@Chandoo.. I just return with a new calendar version.
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/calendar-pedrowave.xltx
It helped me to practice conditional formatting, formulas to show check boxes, data validation drop down list, find out Thanksgiving Day's date for any year, how to find dates of public holidays using Excel, all reading your wonderful posts!
Perpetual Calendar Spanish version starting weeks on Monday:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/calendario-pedrowave.xltx
Main characteristics:
- Not macros.
- Select a year from 1900 to 9999 with a dropdown listbox.
- All date fields with the real date format.
- Easy language change of day of the week and month names because are also dates.
- Hide Saturdays and/or Sundays.
- Week starting on Sunday or Monday.
- Week and month numbers.
- Hyperlink between sheets.
- Consistent colors to Holidays, Diary and Events dates.
- Easy change of Holidays by country.
- Include 80 World Days and you can add more.
- A diary with my birthday and 50 more programable appointments.
- Check box to hide individual dates or all.
- Holidays, diary and events text are showed on each month's sheet.
- Ranges defined with Name Manager variables.
I'll appreciate if you make me some suggestions to improve this calendar.
Pedro.
Please, I need help!
I like all calendar from Pedro, thank you for them. Let me show my problem:
I have 2 excel cells (for example AE12 and AE13) which mean the starting and the ending date of my duty. I need a macro to insert sheets with label YEAR. MONTH (for example 2010. August or similar) with the proper datas between the two dates. Is it possible?
Thank you for reading me and sorry about my terribel english! 🙂
Hello Pedro,
Thanks so much for the modified calendar template. I love the extra functionality you added. Is there any way you could upload an unlocked version? I wanted to change some of the comments and data validation so I could use it for one of my applications.
As for feedback on potential improvements, with all the additions you made the file runs pretty slow. I'm sure this has to do with all the interconnectivity between the various tabs, but if there is a way to use less memory via more efficient formulas or something else I think this would make it easier to use. I have a brand new computer and with it running alone the response was pretty slow. One of the changes I'm making is changing the order of the months to match my company's fiscal year, so maybe something to automate a change like that could be useful.
Cheers,
Peter
Peter, my calendars are unlocked but you need Excel 2007 and 2010 versions to open them.
Now I return with a new Programmable Task Calendar:
http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Calendario%20de%20Tareas.xlsx
Wath an introductory video here:
http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/10/programmable-task-calendar.html
This new calendar allows to select the start month to match the school and fiscal year.
This is great stuff Chandoo and company
Wanted to know if someone had built something similar
I need to store one Excel Sheet on this calendar that has all the holidays
US Holidays appear in RED
UK Holidays appear in Blue
Meetings appear in Green
Submissions appear in Orange
Is there a way I can store the list in a separate worksheet and all the calendars get updated with this?
Thanks
[...] Calendars: Year 2010 Excel Calendar | Year 2009 Excel [...]
please tell me "how to convert Rs.10000/- in to words through excel formula
[...] is all! http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/12/11/2010-calendar-excel-template-downloads/ See more Templates at http://www.vertex42.com/ Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]
Greetings,
Thanks for this wonderful excel vacation tracker. I notice that the tracker only has three months November, December and January 2015, however, I would like to add the other ten months for 2014. Can you please instruct me on how I can add the other months?
Thanking you in advance.
Hi Chandoo,
Calendar: can this be printed as single sheet 8.5x11 inch per month
kanu
@Kanu
Yes,
You can resize it to fit
WOW! I just searching some of like this, that help me.
Thank you for sharing.