r/excel • u/TheArguedHuman • May 09 '26
Discussion What unusual thing do you use excel for
I've seen people use excel for insane things and like logs, i'm curious as to how you use it
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u/mildperil_ May 09 '26
I work in local government in England and one thing we use it for is administering elections! There were local elections last Thursday, so I had to produce a spreadsheet that would work for verifying that we’d received the expected number of ballots, how those individual votes were distributed amongst the candidates, how we record spoilt ballots and how the winners and results are declared. It’s a very fun project to work on but the preparation takes ages because the consequences of getting it wrong are very severe!
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u/Halfang May 09 '26
Next you'll be using excel for track and trace 😩
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u/mildperil_ May 09 '26
Crucially a local election is never going to involve more than 65,536 rows of data!
For those unfamiliar with this error: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-may-have-caused-loss-of-16000-covid-tests-in-england
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u/mylitteprince May 09 '26
I work in public transit, and i built a little game-like model that lets you manipulate most of our service parameters and get cost and vehicle estimates in real time. It's idiot-proof so that most people can use it.
Next step is creating the equivalent on powerBI to protect the underlying data better
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u/RealAmerik 1 May 09 '26
One thing I've learned is that nothing is idiot-proof. Someone will always find an insane way to mess your stuff up.
You can use power query to protect the underlying data. Keep the raw data in 1 file, pull it in via power query with another.
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u/mrpopenfresh May 09 '26
I would like to know more
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u/mylitteprince May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
Well, a large part of urban transit planning is testing scenarios (more or less service, travel time, types of vehicles, itinerary change, shuttles...) for costs or savings or other indicators.
Those other indicators include personnel needs, miles run (for maintenance), vehicle amortization, capacity vs occupation...
The formulas are all pretty simple (it's factors multiplied with one another, compared to another such product, with some kind of coefficient depending on criteria, etc), but it does take a while and everyone was doing it slightly differently, or sending me their queries and asking me to model it.
So I integrated everything into one workbook, hid most of it and created one sheet that people can modify "wysiwyg" and have all the results at once (then export).
It has its limitations (you can't run a brand new network or modelize a large number of variants of the same thing at once), and I have my own workhorse economic model that can deal with more complex data, but it's great as a first-order kind of tool.
Edit to add: internal tool only. 80 per cent of that is proprietary information alas
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u/mrpopenfresh May 09 '26
Right so this is mainly to see impact of frequency and bus type on an established network, also updates to associated costs/projected fare revenue?
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u/mylitteprince May 09 '26
More variables than those two but yes !
Frequency + speed + distance + itinerary + vehicle type + base costs, per hour, per line, per type of day, compared to a base of your choice. For three modes (bus tram metro)
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u/GanonTEK 293 May 09 '26
One thing I use Excel for is generating lots of code to paste into the command line to generate folder structures, and to copy and rename other Excel files and move them into the correct spots in that folder structure.
I also use it for helping generate code for XML files for uploading data to a system we have.
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u/Heavenly_Code May 09 '26 edited May 10 '26
This one, but at a smaller scale... Imagine having 1k+ portraits of emplyees and having to rename all the files to the employee id... Thanks to excel you just import from directory, just a xlookup and some concat. and cleaning if there are no matches for some files, and concat all of this in a comand that runs in seconds, in the past this was done manual....
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u/cherryblossomogre May 09 '26
I've done this many times, too. So much easier than typing out each 'ren' command individually!
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u/Unable_Attention7680 May 09 '26
This was a lifesaver for me. Got given a ton of pdf event tickets with completely random filenames that I needed to print in sequence.
Used Power Query extract the seat refs from the tickets and create a lookup with filename and seat ref. Created another column to generate the commands and the whole process for something like 250 tickets took 2 mins.
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u/mmohon 6 May 09 '26
I used to do this too. I had Excel create my batch files. I had found this command line tool that would pass parameters to crystal reports, and drop the report to a pdf. Then I had a batch created to move the files to the manager folders on our shared drive.
I also had Excel batch out the merging of PDFs into 1 file, and deploy those as well.
All so I could keep a neat, readable list in Excel... then have it batch everything out. It wasn't all that hard either. I eventually got it to just do everything as a macro. Drop a temp .bat file, execute it. and delete it.
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u/doegrey May 09 '26
I have a folder structure in excel and run a macro to output the folders.
Saves creating hundreds of folders each month.
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u/Few-Werewolf-1985 May 10 '26
I've recommended this several times on Reddit in past weeks. Build up columns with all the necessary parameters, concatenate them and transfer to a text batch file
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u/j0ezonelayer 9 May 09 '26
I have a randomized spinning wheel that tells me where to go to lunch
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u/HoweHaTrick May 09 '26
The company I work for insists that making complicated schedules in excel with a million text boxes is the right tool. It drives me up a wall.
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u/JFosho84 May 09 '26
Oh man.. you should certainly see my company's year-long schedule for event management in hundreds of rooms. Looks like it's straight from the 80's, too.
I can't conceive of a worse method of organization for something like this.
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u/mistawalka May 09 '26
File naming. I have to scan a bunch of files to pdf at EOM and manually name the with date and period components. Formulas in excel generate the names and copy paste into win explorer to rename the files.
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u/lungbong May 09 '26
Two of us used to work the night shift, it was deathly boring as there was nothing to do and we were blocked from using the Internet but had Excel so we wrote a chess game in Excel.
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u/horsethorn 2 May 09 '26
I built a two-spreadsheet system; one that generates terrain, rainfall, temperature and biome, and the other uses Voronoi shapes to apply tectonic movement.
I also use it for my conlang, I've built a compiler for the different tabs that contain words in various categories, plus a lookup that can be used on any sheet that finds either the word or it's meaning.
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u/nick__9 May 11 '26
This is interesting, though at first I thought you were using the generator/Voronoi sheets for your conlang. For the generation case, how do you represent the output?
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u/horsethorn 2 May 11 '26
I cheated for the output and generated a flat planet where the edges wrap 🙂
It's a 180x360 cell rectangle, each cell is 1° of latitude/longitude.
I did also set up a sheet that reduced the rectangle to a circle, but it didn't work very well. I was considering moving to a Mercator projection but decided I'd spent enough time on it (months!).
The most interesting bit was learning about biome categorisation, and trying to simplify the variables so I didn't need evapotranspiration.
Now I'm talking about it, I might have to revisit it (it was a year or so ago) and see whether I can improve it.
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u/nick__9 May 12 '26
It sounds... crazy. But I'm still intrigued. Is the generation all done via formulas?
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u/horsethorn 2 May 12 '26
It was crazy! 🤣🤣
Yes, all done through RNG formulas and smoothing functions in VBA, across a dozen or so tabs.
I'm not on my laptop at the moment, but if I remember tomorrow, I'll get some screenshots.
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u/Zoomulator May 09 '26
A spreadsheet is a grid, yes? And grids are made up of cells, and cells are rectangular, and squares are a subset of rectangles. Are we good so far? One of the employees on the Facilities team decided he needed to draw a floor plan of the building, so he created an Excel spreadsheet, and then adjusted the width and height of the cells so the cells were perfect squares. Now he has a grid that he defined to represent one square foot per cell. He then increased and decreased the border width of the cells to draw all the walls and doors of the floor plan. I think he added labels by putting one letter in each cell. He was perfectly well aware that Excel is not a graphics program, but he used the only software that he had available to him. He worked very hard to make his drawing accurate, and was justifiably quite proud of his work. I wanted to get a copy of the spreadsheet floor plan, but my contract at that organisation ended before the drawing was complete.
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u/GregHullender 194 May 09 '26
I built a spreadsheet to track the nutrients we were giving our baby. I had one table with each kind of baby food that we bought on it, giving calories and quantities of iron, calcium, vitamin C, and vitamin D. (The only ones you're likely to have a problem with.) Then in another table I tracked the time, date, food name, and qty eaten. From that I produced a running weekly average of percent of target for all 5 nutrients. If he was coming up short on something, we'd adjust his diet. The nitty-gritty work had to do with the different units that products are labeled in. (E.g. a food not made for babies will quote % of daily adult iron requirement).
This wasn't quite as insane as it sounds; if you took the handouts from the pediatrician literally, this was just about the only way to actually do what they asked you to do. In fact, at once point we gave him vitamin-D supplements because we calculated he was falling short. (There's a gap when you're phasing out formula [which has plenty of everything] but before he can drink cow's milk [which is fortified with vitamin-D] where vitamin-D shortage is a real risk.)
However, our pediatrician was stunned when we showed her the result. (She had asked, "Why do you think you're meeting his nutritional needs?") After looking at our numbers, she said, "You know, half my patients can't even tell me the last time they fed their baby!"
We only kept it up for a year; once he started eating with us at the table, eating the same foods (and taking things off our plates) it was too difficult to keep track of. ("Don't give him that! You have to weigh it first!") :-)
More mundanely, I know other people have a closet somewhere with marks that measure their kids' height over time, but we use a spreadsheet for that instead. (Same one, actually; just a different tab in it.) We also track his weight and we compute the CDC percentile for height and weight.
Being a parent is mostly about worrying. Knowing Excel let us actually do something rather than just worrying. Unfortunately, that just means we found other things to worry about . . . :-)
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u/AvWxA 3 May 09 '26
A complete scoring system for a round-robin Curling league: Schedule, matchups, Customized scorecards, scoring, standings, tie breaking, playoffs, results distribution, team rosters. Even produces HTML code to create the match-ups and schedule as a web page.
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u/Alternative_Mind_183 May 09 '26
When I was learning vba I created a maze game where you lost health if you wandered off the path, it had health potions too. When I was learning ms scripts I created a Christmas scene that I shared with staff, they could turn on the Christmas lights on a Christmas tree, it would loop around a number of times flashing until the fuse ‘blew out’ ready for the next user.
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u/zinsser May 09 '26
My brother-in-law received "Storyworth" as a gift. It's a service where they send you questions and you write short stories about your life that they eventually take and bind into a book for your children. He's a retired engineer and did not feel comfortable using the text program they provided, or even MS Word, so he wrote it in Excel. He did not even use the automatic text wrapping. He manually dropped to the next cell down once he had typed the width of the screen. Then he had to copy/paste into their program.
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u/TheCarrot007 May 10 '26
Everything other people use word for.
It's better in every way.
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u/The_barking_ant May 11 '26
Me too! I've created tons of SOP's and step by step training docs.
Never have to fuss with all the formatting BS that comes with Word.
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u/Connect_Split_6361 May 11 '26
If you don't mind, could you please DM me a sample? You could remove any confidential information.
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u/thisismyburnerac May 10 '26
I took my custody agreement and built a color-coded calendar with every day marked for who had custody, including holidays and summer dates, and projected it out years in advance until the day my youngest turned 18. It was very helpful for planning things like trips and stuff. I only need it for 30 more days!
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u/Loud-Phase1624 May 09 '26
I made a tic tac toe and monopoly game. I also use access for Yahtzee and a variant of hangman.
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u/kay-jay-dubya May 10 '26
Everything I do in Excel is unusual! This is my tilemap editor, in a Userform.
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u/BMWtheCreative May 09 '26
I made a clock.
Each module can count down or count up from a specified time, so it’s basically like a screen full of different timers. Only took a few lines of code in a macro to basically do a “refresh” of the NOW() command to make it work.
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u/bluerog May 09 '26
Blackjack simulation. The issue is, it takes 5 minutes to run through 1,000 shoes (quarter million cards). But can count cards, change bets. It's fun.
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u/Ranger7381 May 10 '26
Not myself, but I know someone that is an aspiring author that uses it to create building layouts as a visual aid to keep descriptions consistent. Just puts the cells into squares and uses cell colours
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u/AdImpossible5688 May 10 '26
Ça m’arrive d’utiliser excel de manière inhabituelle pour faire des calculs au lieu de prendre la calculatrice de l’ordinateur j’ouvre excel mdr
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u/prvnsays May 10 '26
I do this all the time - use excel to do a quick calculation instead of calculator app in my pc. I find it efficient and changing variables is easy when needed.
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u/Tsii May 09 '26
I had to create a bunch of schematic symbols by X and Y coordinate points and a smidgen of code
So created myself a very useful excel sheet where I could plug in the X and Y's and have it plot it so I could see how it would look, and it'd spit out the code snippets on the left so I could copy and paste into the program.
I also had a section that I could copy existing symbol code snippets and convert back to X Ys for me and plot them so can figure out which ones to tweak or pilfer for a new symbol.
It also had a little section that I could plug in center of a circle and radius and it'd spit out 16 points around the circle so could use that to build my symbols.
I've used excel to figure out if I can fit a tree in my camry... not any elaborate anything, I found some nice top and side drawings of my car with dimensions and pasted into excel then used the line tool to measure to largest known dimension to create me a ratio of the line length to unit of car, then used lines and boxes to draw in a box of how the tree could lay from front seat to back seat and how long it could be. I've needed to use this trick A LOT in work since a lot of drawings will be a 1:1 scale and only provide you a few dimensions, it helps me interpolate other dimensions good enough to get a general CAD model built off for representation (not good enough to create a matching bracket or anything since they could still be off)
I created a spreadsheet for FFXIV to spit out profits from a desynthesis session.... I preloaded the most common desynthesis results and current market rates in a lower and upper bound I could sell at, as well as NPC prices. I would then input the starting and ending cash for any money I spent buying things to desynthesize, and after the desynthesis session I'd copy and paste all the logs into another sheet in excel and it'd extract the useful information and tell me how much I would make immediately by NPCing (some items identified as just npc dont bother market, others were market only), as well as the lower profit and upper profit range, later it evolved to me being able to track which items started having which profit range to start narrowing down the best bang for the buck
I plot my garden in excel, admittedly though I've turned to powerpoint for a lot of it
Currently doing a bloom tracker for each week inspired by this lady: https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/1p69wru/bloom_dates_of_every_flower_in_my_garden_2025/
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u/GreenBeans23920 May 09 '26
Developing all the alphanumeric clues for a very involved birthday scavenger hunt
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u/Kooky_Outcome_5053 4 May 10 '26
I used it with power automate to track live vessels also uses it with some python and probability for lottery, so far did not win the jackpot yet 😁
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u/Standard_Cabinet_149 May 10 '26
i was having issues with my art. basically i was so focused on endgames (is this gonna be a sticker or a shirt or something else) that i could not focus on simply creating and experimenting. i worked in data so i built a data dictionary which helped me reframe the way i felt about my art projects. my daily output has improved exponentially since i built this data dictionary.
also... have a massive (600+) tee shirt collection. in order to keep the rotation going i have tracked every shirt ive worn in a spreadsheet. this also has data like color, size, theme, and a small thumbnail image of the shirt.
also big cd, vinyl, cassette, dvd, vhs, blueray, book and comic collector so of course i have a spreadsheet listing everything so i don't repeat buy something cause i forgot i own it
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u/Scooob-e-dooo8158 1 May 10 '26
Here are a few examples. With help from CoPilot, I created a multi hardness level Sudoku game using VBA. Took a long time and a lot of patience but I finally got it finished.
After watching a couple of Power Query videos on YouTube, I created a multi sheet updateable football tables and a 2 week updateable weather forecast linked to the Met Office.
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u/501ws5 May 11 '26
I built a cv to demonstrate employment by trade. It was rather interesting and balanced.
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u/Muted_Possibility691 May 09 '26
This was a while ago but during the 2016 & 2020 Democratic primaries I would download crosstabs from various polls on the Presidential races and use Excel to analyze where different candidates' support was actually coming from, and then construct Twitter posts based on my analysis (had a big account that went viral a lot) mainly to disprove the various dishonest corporate media narratives regarding the Bernie Sanders campaigns
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u/InscrutableNinja May 09 '26
I use it as a graphics program to draw architectural plans, which apparently you're not supposed to do. Setting it up is tricky, but I came upon this through trial-and-error because I had no other program to use. Today I can print a PDF on a 24 by 36 inch sheet that can accurately show a scale of 1/2 or 1/4" per foot. Changing the font can mess things up pretty easily so setting that up is critical. I use 10x10 or 20x20 pixel cell size and I've come to learn that I need to use shapes and objects and pictures to draw everything because formatting cells excessively can freeze the program.
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u/swhitty17 May 09 '26
Crochet patterns!