Oh Sheet! Spreadsheet I mean

I am a techie and ever since being exposed to spreadsheets way back in the dawn of time, I have used them for most everything.

Spreadsheets are a combination of rows and columns which store data and that data can be acted upon mathematically or have its’ text manipulated.

I use spreadsheets to look at trends in data but also to create and use TO DO lists. I will use column A to contain a priority and column B to contain the item description. I can insert them in any order and then just sort by column A so that my highest priority items appear first.

I have added years worth of weather station data into a spreadsheet, that data containing outdoor temperature and solar strength. That allowed me to determine the best location east to west to catch the most sunlight. We get cloudy in the afternoons so I will point them to take advantage more of morning than afternoon sun.

Because spreadsheets have rows and columns, I came upon a somewhat novel use for my farm. I was planting coffee trees in rows and columns. By numbering the rows and columns of trees I added them to the spreadsheet. I can track trees in the spreadsheet and if I really wanted to get technical could track leaf samples and fertilizing schedules. Of course, the more data on each square I want to collect would be better served by use of a data base, which I also am quite familiar with.

Both databases and spreadsheets allow you to perform searches based upon relationships. I can look for things between a minimum and maximum value or that contain a specific value, then sort and display or graph the result. The graphing is built into the spreadsheets I use.

A couple of popular PC versions of spreadsheet software are Excel by Microsoft and the free version called Calc in the Openoffice suite of software. Google has an online app called Sheets which easily allows collaboration of multiple people.

Perhaps you want to play with spreadsheets this week if to do nothing more than create that TO DO list