The Spreadsheet Sign
I’ve loved spreadsheets for nearly 30 years. We got our first computer in 1986, when I was nine. It had a monochrome monitor for word processing and spreadsheets, and a color monitor for games and painting programs. It also had 2 floppy disk drives (one for the program disk, one for the data disk) and a dot matrix printer. Word processing was for homework, and it was a lifesaver. Everything else was (for me) for fun. I loved Paint and Print Shop. I dabbled in games but did poorly at most of them. I watched my father shoot space invaders and he introduced me to spreadsheets. Mostly, at that age, I dabbled in the spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3. I watched it add up or multiply columns of numbers. I watched it sort. I liked the idea that I could type 1 into a box, and type =(box above)+1 and the program would make a list of consecutive numbers for me. I can’t remember if I used it for anything purposeful in elementary school, or even anything worth saving. It was more of a game, and a more immediately satisfying one than being killed by space invaders.
In middle and high school, I learned to put spreadsheets to use crunching numbers for my science fair projects. I learned about means and standard deviations, although I needed to write a BASIC program to calculate t-test scores. I thought it was pretty nifty the way the program would graph for me. My senior year, the printer on my old faithful computer stopped working and I had to learn to use a new spreadsheet program on a new computer the week before the science fair. I think it was called Quattro. Whatever it was, I don’t think I’ve used it since.
But by then, in addition to appreciating the number crunching capabilities of the software, I’d also discovered the amazing text sorting capacity. And I’ve always been a word girl more than a numbers girl. I had two main spreadsheets in that era, one for fun and one for the future. The fun one was an ongoing project I would do at my father’s office. I would walk over there after school and stay until he was ready to leave for the day. Sometimes I read. I answered his phone if he had a meeting elsewhere. And I built my spreadsheet. Slowly over time I created the students of a fictional elementary school. I had their names and ages and addresses and teachers, creating families with different numbers of children and enrolling them. I think I had birthdays and parent names also. I don’t recall anything I actually DID with the information, such as creating stories about the people, although at the time I was always creating characters and stories.
The other major spreadsheet of high school was my college decision spreadsheet. I started with one of those books of all the colleges and made a list of schools in my desired geographical range. I added data that mattered to me, including the percent of out-of-state applicants, class size, common majors, percent of students in fraternities and sororities and average entrance SAT scores. I sorted the list a few different ways, removed some schools, and wrote to a number asking for course catalogs. I added more columns based on the responses, and over time, sorted and culled again. I toured a number of schools and repeated the process, finally settling on a few to interview. The decision to apply Early Decision to Bryn Mawr was made less scientifically, but it was the spreadsheet system that got and kept it on the list to reach that point.
By college I was on Excel, which is the spreadsheet program I continue to use today. Most of the spreadsheets from that era were fun ones. I made one to see if there was a relationship between the dorm a student lived in and their geographic origin. And I made one to organize my May Day gifts and their intended recipients. I’m sure there were more. A year or so after college I made a spreadsheet of all the songs I knew. (First I had to decide how to operationally define “knowing” a song.) I’m sorry I’ve lost that one. I’ve also lost the spreadsheet of ER episodes I have on video tape. I still have the videotapes but not a functional VCR.
When I was teaching, I had a spreadsheet of medical schools. When I was in medical school, I had a spreadsheet of residency programs. In residency, I had a spreadsheet of fellowships. I would study by spreadsheet. Pharmacology in particular lent well to this approach, since I could sort the list by medication name or class, depending. I also ran a spreadsheet in medical school looking for a correlation between how much I liked or disliked a professor and what medical school that professor had attended. Spreadsheets can be quite therapeutic.
I used a spreadsheet to gather data from my fellowship research. I worked with two different statisticians. The first one told me that a spreadsheet was the best way to get my data to her. We met once, and she showed me that you can name the multiple pages in an Excel workbook, rather than leaving them names Sheet 1, Sheet 2 and Sheet 3. She also showed me that you can create additional sheets. I had been using Excel, I thought wisely, for 20 years without discovering this feature. The second statistician told me that spreadsheets were not a good way to submit data and that I should ask the statistician beforehand next time. More spreadsheets for the rest of us, I suppose.
More recently, running a spreadsheet has been a reasonable indicator of the importance of a thing. Not always, as I have had a few spreadsheets devoted to the results of various games in and one tallying up items of clothing to better direct an upcoming shopping spree. I also have one for a few mystery series I read, noting which books I own and which I still need to get to complete the set. I don’t yet have one of books I own, in toto, although I probably should.
I keep an annual blood sugar spreadsheet, noting blood glucose levels, amount of insulin taken, carbohydrates consumed and other factors such as exercise. It has additional pages where I note pump setting changes and calculate carbohydrates in a given dish. This year I added a page for menu planning. In one column I listed the foods I frequently cook (or infrequently cook because I keep forgetting to cook them) to inspire me. In the next I list the meals I plan to eat the next week, duplicating entries if I plan to have left-overs. I have space to note dishes that I need to prepare and also a carbohydrate tally for any composite dishes like cookies or macaroni and cheese.
I run a workbook at work for various questionnaires I need to score frequently. In addition to generating a total score, each generates several sub-scores based on the answers to various combinations of questions, and this can be tedious work when done by hand. So now I enter all the answers into the spreadsheet and it calculates the individual sub-scores for me. I’m still struggling with one of them, where the answer circled is not the actual score for that item. A circled 4 could correspond to a score of 0, 1, 2 or 3, depending on the item. I think a series of IF-THEN statements is going to help me there.
Then there’s my travel workbook. When I am planning a trip, I use the second page to enter possible flights with their departure and arrival times, layover airports and layover time. When I choose a flight, I move its information to the front page, along with other relevant information such as hotel address, phone number and reservation number, phone numbers of anyone I plan to see on the trip, and addresses and directions to any place I plan to visit.
I’ve started an apartment workbook. So far I have columns for address, number of bedrooms, price, and particulars about laundry and dishwashing. I’ll update it with notes on places after I have seen them. And I have a PA document worksheet, with a running list of all the papers I need for my PA medical license and my credentialing packet. The last time I moved, I had a spreadsheet of boxes and their general contents, and will probably do the same for my upcoming move.
At work right now is my transition spreadsheet. I have listed my patients, and for each note birthdates, relevant diagnosis, whether I prescribe medication for them and when their next visit should be. It took a while to get Excel to calculate ages from birthdates but I figured it out. Over the next few weeks I am filling in the transition column to assign each to another provider. A side effect of using a spreadsheet for this is that I can sort the list any number of ways. By sorting by medication status, I can estimate how many patients need visits every 3 months for med checks versus every 6-12 months, and give more accurate data to my office manager.
This brings me to a particularly high spreadsheet count at the moment, and all of them serious. Clearly something had to be done. So over the past few days I have gone back through my live journal and catalogued all 368 entries. You see, several times lately I have gone looking for a particular entry to link to someone or print out for someone else but could not remember when I wrote it, and LJ’s search feature is not helpful here. I’ve had to poke around and click on any title that looked promising. So I now have a searchable database, listing, title, date and either a sentence summary or any other keywords I might use which do not appear in the title. It should be short work to add subsequent entries to it as they are written.
Spreadsheets appeal to the way my mind works, liking things in linear format with information attached to each item. I like how they can categorize and re-categorize the same information by different criteria. Add information in random order, then sort by date and presto, chronological lists! Or alphabetical lists! Or a count of people, places or things that share a specific trait, just by creating a new column and tagging it Y/N for each entry. How many patients do I have over 10? Just sort. Which apartments are on Shady Lane? Just sort. Add the search feature and. . . well I could go on and on, but spreadsheet lovers already know, and no one else will ever quite understand.
There’s one thing, though, a favor I have to ask of you. Please stop me if I ever propose making a spreadsheet to catalogue spreadsheets.
In middle and high school, I learned to put spreadsheets to use crunching numbers for my science fair projects. I learned about means and standard deviations, although I needed to write a BASIC program to calculate t-test scores. I thought it was pretty nifty the way the program would graph for me. My senior year, the printer on my old faithful computer stopped working and I had to learn to use a new spreadsheet program on a new computer the week before the science fair. I think it was called Quattro. Whatever it was, I don’t think I’ve used it since.
But by then, in addition to appreciating the number crunching capabilities of the software, I’d also discovered the amazing text sorting capacity. And I’ve always been a word girl more than a numbers girl. I had two main spreadsheets in that era, one for fun and one for the future. The fun one was an ongoing project I would do at my father’s office. I would walk over there after school and stay until he was ready to leave for the day. Sometimes I read. I answered his phone if he had a meeting elsewhere. And I built my spreadsheet. Slowly over time I created the students of a fictional elementary school. I had their names and ages and addresses and teachers, creating families with different numbers of children and enrolling them. I think I had birthdays and parent names also. I don’t recall anything I actually DID with the information, such as creating stories about the people, although at the time I was always creating characters and stories.
The other major spreadsheet of high school was my college decision spreadsheet. I started with one of those books of all the colleges and made a list of schools in my desired geographical range. I added data that mattered to me, including the percent of out-of-state applicants, class size, common majors, percent of students in fraternities and sororities and average entrance SAT scores. I sorted the list a few different ways, removed some schools, and wrote to a number asking for course catalogs. I added more columns based on the responses, and over time, sorted and culled again. I toured a number of schools and repeated the process, finally settling on a few to interview. The decision to apply Early Decision to Bryn Mawr was made less scientifically, but it was the spreadsheet system that got and kept it on the list to reach that point.
By college I was on Excel, which is the spreadsheet program I continue to use today. Most of the spreadsheets from that era were fun ones. I made one to see if there was a relationship between the dorm a student lived in and their geographic origin. And I made one to organize my May Day gifts and their intended recipients. I’m sure there were more. A year or so after college I made a spreadsheet of all the songs I knew. (First I had to decide how to operationally define “knowing” a song.) I’m sorry I’ve lost that one. I’ve also lost the spreadsheet of ER episodes I have on video tape. I still have the videotapes but not a functional VCR.
When I was teaching, I had a spreadsheet of medical schools. When I was in medical school, I had a spreadsheet of residency programs. In residency, I had a spreadsheet of fellowships. I would study by spreadsheet. Pharmacology in particular lent well to this approach, since I could sort the list by medication name or class, depending. I also ran a spreadsheet in medical school looking for a correlation between how much I liked or disliked a professor and what medical school that professor had attended. Spreadsheets can be quite therapeutic.
I used a spreadsheet to gather data from my fellowship research. I worked with two different statisticians. The first one told me that a spreadsheet was the best way to get my data to her. We met once, and she showed me that you can name the multiple pages in an Excel workbook, rather than leaving them names Sheet 1, Sheet 2 and Sheet 3. She also showed me that you can create additional sheets. I had been using Excel, I thought wisely, for 20 years without discovering this feature. The second statistician told me that spreadsheets were not a good way to submit data and that I should ask the statistician beforehand next time. More spreadsheets for the rest of us, I suppose.
More recently, running a spreadsheet has been a reasonable indicator of the importance of a thing. Not always, as I have had a few spreadsheets devoted to the results of various games in and one tallying up items of clothing to better direct an upcoming shopping spree. I also have one for a few mystery series I read, noting which books I own and which I still need to get to complete the set. I don’t yet have one of books I own, in toto, although I probably should.
I keep an annual blood sugar spreadsheet, noting blood glucose levels, amount of insulin taken, carbohydrates consumed and other factors such as exercise. It has additional pages where I note pump setting changes and calculate carbohydrates in a given dish. This year I added a page for menu planning. In one column I listed the foods I frequently cook (or infrequently cook because I keep forgetting to cook them) to inspire me. In the next I list the meals I plan to eat the next week, duplicating entries if I plan to have left-overs. I have space to note dishes that I need to prepare and also a carbohydrate tally for any composite dishes like cookies or macaroni and cheese.
I run a workbook at work for various questionnaires I need to score frequently. In addition to generating a total score, each generates several sub-scores based on the answers to various combinations of questions, and this can be tedious work when done by hand. So now I enter all the answers into the spreadsheet and it calculates the individual sub-scores for me. I’m still struggling with one of them, where the answer circled is not the actual score for that item. A circled 4 could correspond to a score of 0, 1, 2 or 3, depending on the item. I think a series of IF-THEN statements is going to help me there.
Then there’s my travel workbook. When I am planning a trip, I use the second page to enter possible flights with their departure and arrival times, layover airports and layover time. When I choose a flight, I move its information to the front page, along with other relevant information such as hotel address, phone number and reservation number, phone numbers of anyone I plan to see on the trip, and addresses and directions to any place I plan to visit.
I’ve started an apartment workbook. So far I have columns for address, number of bedrooms, price, and particulars about laundry and dishwashing. I’ll update it with notes on places after I have seen them. And I have a PA document worksheet, with a running list of all the papers I need for my PA medical license and my credentialing packet. The last time I moved, I had a spreadsheet of boxes and their general contents, and will probably do the same for my upcoming move.
At work right now is my transition spreadsheet. I have listed my patients, and for each note birthdates, relevant diagnosis, whether I prescribe medication for them and when their next visit should be. It took a while to get Excel to calculate ages from birthdates but I figured it out. Over the next few weeks I am filling in the transition column to assign each to another provider. A side effect of using a spreadsheet for this is that I can sort the list any number of ways. By sorting by medication status, I can estimate how many patients need visits every 3 months for med checks versus every 6-12 months, and give more accurate data to my office manager.
This brings me to a particularly high spreadsheet count at the moment, and all of them serious. Clearly something had to be done. So over the past few days I have gone back through my live journal and catalogued all 368 entries. You see, several times lately I have gone looking for a particular entry to link to someone or print out for someone else but could not remember when I wrote it, and LJ’s search feature is not helpful here. I’ve had to poke around and click on any title that looked promising. So I now have a searchable database, listing, title, date and either a sentence summary or any other keywords I might use which do not appear in the title. It should be short work to add subsequent entries to it as they are written.
Spreadsheets appeal to the way my mind works, liking things in linear format with information attached to each item. I like how they can categorize and re-categorize the same information by different criteria. Add information in random order, then sort by date and presto, chronological lists! Or alphabetical lists! Or a count of people, places or things that share a specific trait, just by creating a new column and tagging it Y/N for each entry. How many patients do I have over 10? Just sort. Which apartments are on Shady Lane? Just sort. Add the search feature and. . . well I could go on and on, but spreadsheet lovers already know, and no one else will ever quite understand.
There’s one thing, though, a favor I have to ask of you. Please stop me if I ever propose making a spreadsheet to catalogue spreadsheets.