Need a favor from someone decent with Excel

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Oct 14 2007, 10:00 PM) [snapback]525671[/snapback]</div>

Don't know that it is what you're looking for, but I've sent you mine via PM. It is very crude (perhaps I should just say "basic"), but it gets me the info I want to play with. I still keep all the data in a small book in my car, but having a spreadsheet gives me chance to come up with such interesting data points as "miles per day" and "dollars per mile" when I sit and play at Excel.

 

I'd be happy to help you too, Evan, but it sounds like you have enough already. Maybe you could post up the spreadsheet and have a few of us offer suggestions for improvement, and let more of us use it. Don't feel dumb. Excel is both simple and complex, and will just sit there staring back at you if you don't know the commands.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hyo silver @ Oct 14 2007, 10:31 PM) [snapback]525680[/snapback]</div>

Maybe what would be helpful is just a list of datapoints that would be most useful to track. I have a very simple spreadsheet, and I gather info in the simplest format. I'd like to find out what raw data people record and what they do with it. I know some folks won't want to make their spreadsheets completely public, but perhaps they can share pieces of those spreadsheets or at least the datapoints they track.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tideland Prius @ Oct 14 2007, 11:40 PM) [snapback]525684[/snapback]</div>

 

[attachmentid=12030]This is the Excel form I made up or myself. If you can adapt it for your own use, please do. If not I'd be happy to make one just like your handwritten one.

 

At first glance, I'd say you're doing far more hand calculations than you need to. For input data, all you really need is trip miles and fuel. Pretty much everything else derives from that. Noting the 'mpg shown' will help you track any discrepancy between it and calculated mpg, and it would be interesting to see if it's consistent. You can do an 'edit', 'move or copy sheet' to keep the current and prior years in one file, and link the pages to connect the lifetime data. The possibilities are endless - would you prefer to learn, or have one of us email you a fill-in-the-blanks version?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(efusco @ Oct 14 2007, 11:03 PM) [snapback]525701[/snapback]</div>

Nice to see that I'm not the only person on planet earth with terrible writing skills

With experience, Excel and for that matter all the Office products, are easy to customise to your liking. I have a very simple Excel spreadsheet to calculate home energy use, and a fancier sheet for simple business expenses.

 

Evan may have gotten what he needs by now, but I'll post mine here anyway. It might be nice for this thread to become the repository/contest for best gas/mileage logs!

Mine was lifted from someone else here, but I modified it a bit to do things the way I want. One thing that especially bugs me in excel is math errors showing up in cells as "####" or "#Value!" so I added some conditional logic to leave fields blank until the row is filled in Also note the "Chart" page that graphs values over time. I had a second sheet in the same doc that tracked gas use in our Camry and charted on the same chart, and it's funny to compare most vehicles' gas use to that of a Prius... I took that page out since it's not 100% relevant here.

The left-hand side is for inputs, the fields under the blue headers, from DATE to CAR MPG (i.e. what your MFD says) are filled in by hand and the rest is calculated.

[attachmentid=12037]

I left in my actual data so you can see what a filled-in sheet looks like. I can only claim responsibility for the tanks with higher avg MPG on my spreadsheet though because my wife gets to drive the Prius most of the time

[edit]
On closer inspection of Evan's spreadsheet, I think I'll add in another page with his comparison of monthly/yearly MPG avgs. Then I'll start training my wife to P&G and see if the numbers go up! My sheet is not optimized for printing, and I usually just write the ODO and MFD-MPG on the gas receipt so all the info I need is in one place.

 

Since you mention cost per mile, I think I'll also add a page that lets me input service info, and that also adds that into the cost/mile calculation... while I'm at it, I think I'll factor in the purchase price, and watch the lifetime cost per mile go steadily down as the car ages

 

For anyone else that would like a spreadsheet, but who does not have a copy of MS Office, there are a couple of alternatives:
Google documents has a free spreadsheet. It is stored online, so you can access it from any computer with Internet access... this has some advantages.
OpenOffice.org has a free version of the "Office" suite, if you'd like the tools on your computer without the cost.

 

Fine, here's the google version of my spreadsheet :

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p3d...QH9SA&hl=en

The chart page didn't import properly, but it's no big loss. FWIW you can open .XLS files in both OpenOffice.org and Google, so anyone who doesn't own M$Office should still be able to view them.

 

Thank you Ichabod for posting your spreadsheet! It's going to come in handy and you saved me a LOT of work (I've been putting this one off for a while)

I added a couple columns at the end for gas station name and location so I can track if there is a mileage trend (good or bad) for any particular station / brand.

For the ubergeeks wanting to use the Avg Temp column, I found these web sites from which the data can be gathered:

http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/wmores40.jsp?...6georegionabbv=

http://www.engr.udayton.edu/weather/citylistUS.htm

 

Oh wow, I'm glad I didn't follow through on my half-promise to do that for you, because Mark clearly knows excel a lot better than me Your new one even has some nice features that I might have to borrow for my spreadsheet now!