Sure, you know that Excel is useful for crunching numbers. You can populate spreadsheets with formulas and scenarios, and transform figures into charts. But did you know that Excel is also a tool for pilots, parents, pianists, and poets? You might be surprised at how some people have used the software. Here are just a few unusual uses that we found:
- One company uses Excel as a learning aid for pilot training, turning the worksheets into cockpit mockups, with details and explanations of the lights and indicators.
- Amateur genealogists use Excel worksheets to track the details of their family trees.
- One overwhelmed parent tracked her newborn’s activities in Excel, such as when the baby ate, soiled diapers, and slept. She then created a chart of the baby’s hours awake versus asleep and the ratio of wet versus dirty diapers, trying to predict what would happen and when.
- Excel has been used to create layout plans of buildings, electrical substations, and air conditioning ducting layout.
- Homeowners have redesigned their kitchens positioning scaled images of furniture, cabinets, etc. on a worksheet.
- One facility manager used Excel to keep track of tools in a production plant, including serial number creator, printing plates, and special hardware.
- Another facility manager used Excel to create a map of the building and highlight the emergency exits.
- A sales manager programmed Excel to automatically generate incentive payment letters as he prepares sales reports. A different letter is generated depending on the achievement results.
- One savvy shopper uses Excel as a price book for grocery shopping. She enters items, price, quantity and units, so when she spots an item on sale, she can see at a glance whether it’s a good deal or not.
- An innovative IT manager used Excel to build a desktop management tool to turn off PCs that had been left on overnight. He tracked 2000 machines, learned which ones were turned on, and identified if anyone was logged onto the machine. If not, he turned the machine off remotely. He believes that based on the number of machines that were left on, it worked out to a notable cost (and time) savings.
- A poet stuck for words used Excel’s concatenation function to generate possible rhymes for the words at the end of his poem’s lines.
- One green thumb planned his garden, using Excel’s shapes and VBA.
- A musician used Excel to arrange rock and roll tunes for a player piano. In a player piano roll, the notes are triggered by holes in the paper. Every hole has to have an exact location and length. The person created columns in Excel for measure, beat, note, duration, and then converted that information to the format required by a computer-controller perforator.
Have you seen or developed an unusual and creative use for Excel? Send your stories to catherine@plainlanguagemedia.com.
Do you excel at Excel? Or do you need some help? Law Office Manager is pleased to announce our upcoming webinar on Excel Data Management with Monica Sandler, MCT, CMOM, IC3.
This webinar is for every legal professional who’s ever faced a spreadsheet filled with a ton of data but can’t figure out how to extract specific information from it—whether it’s to track partner start dates, report how many records were moved offsite last month, or to manage mass mailings in a class action suit.
This webinar/training session can be customized to answer your questions! What stumps you about Excel data management? Send your questions or challenges today to catherine@plainlanguagemedia.com and we’ll forward them to Monica, who will use the session to address your needs and get you working with Excel faster and more efficiently.
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