<p>I have to do some interviews for an assignment on Florida Virtual School about spreadsheets. I am not cheating because the interviews are a part of the assignment. Any help would be appreciated.</p>
<p>What spreadsheet software do you use?
For which business functions does your company or you personally use spreadsheets?
What are some personal applications of spreadsheets?</p>
<p>I use Microsoft Excel 2007. At work we’ve got Excel 1997 and Excel 2003 depending on which location I work at. </p>
<p>At home, I use Excel for tracking my money. I have my 3 bank accounts split up and I track when I add money, deposit money, and what for. I also use it for tracking my graduation requirements for college. I have all of my classes in there by class number, name, credit hour, when I intend to take it, and what requirements it meets. </p>
<p>At work, we use it for a lot of things. I’ve worked with calculating surveys, we use it to determine heart rate zones, some workouts, etc. At work, we use a lot of formulas.</p>
<p>We use Excel.</p>
<p>Currently using it to keep track of kids college costs, scholarships, financial aid, taxability of scholarships/grants/529 accounts withdrawals etc</p>
<p>Also my daughter has one set up to keep track of her degree requirements which she uses to keep on track and make sure to tie in premed requirements, required honors courses etc. The whole 4 years is planned out (though she is flexible with it). Her adviser loves her as she comes in the door knowing what she wants to do.</p>
<p>In the past have used it for planning a Girl Scout trip through 7 countries in Europe - both the finances for 8 people on the trip and the booking of trains/planes/hotels/tours etc. Used color coding to differentiate between planned/booked/paid etc</p>
<p>We use Excel at work and at home. (Used to use Lotus pre-1990.) </p>
<p>Business functions were too numerous to mention, but included financial spreadsheets (had templates set up to calculate dozens of financial ratios once the audited balance sheet, operating statement and statement of cash flows were input; pricing models that compared costs of various complex options; basically any financial calculations to optimize cost/benefit). Also kept some simple data bases in Excel rather than Access because it was just easier. Kept daily rates (LIBOR, Treasury, MMD, etc.) with linked graphs.</p>
<p>Home functions includes college costs, college lists with various data points, investments with quarterly results, workout program, some contact lists, etc.</p>
<p>We use Excel at work, but I use OpenOffice (the open-source equivalent of Microsoft Office) at home because it’s free and I like supporting open-source projects.</p>
<p>At work, I use a spreadsheet for things like my department budget tracking, vacation tracking, and project estimates. At home, I use a spreadsheet for personal budgeting, tracking my investments and debts, and keeping track of which colleges my daughter is considering.</p>
<p>I use Excel 7.0 on my Desktop, my laptop runs Open Office Calc 2.o which is very similar. For my architecture business I use it to calculate estimated taxes, keep track of business income and expenses, and to write invoices. I also use it to make calculations for building departments, such as floor area ratios, percent of building coverage on a lot, and percent of impervious surfaces on a lot. </p>
<p>For my art business, I also kept an inventory of my art work though I’ve gotten way behind there. I also use it for some things it’s not intended for like keeping mailing lists which I can merge into other office documents. </p>
<p>For my personal use I’ve used it to track weight loss and I occasionally use it as a calculator. I’ve also got a teeny weeny version of Excel on my PDA running Office Mobile which I’ve used as a calculator.</p>
<p>OK, I use Excel, too, but have also used Google spreadsheets because of the shared functions. Mostly this has been done to share database info (names/addresses) among committee members in a volunteer activity - this let us each enter and access info easiliy.</p>
<p>I use Excel 2003 on my laptop (haven’t felt any need to upgrade to newer). I probably couldn’t even begin to tell you all of the ways I use it. So many.</p>
<p>For business: for financial analyses, for tracking sales, for data base (although not my preferred data base application, I do use it).</p>
<p>For personal: for financial analyses, for inventorying things, for tracking activities (College Application Spreadsheet, anyone 
), for menu planning (!), for major grocery lists for parties/events, for checklists (open and close a vacation home), for comparing major purchases (different cars, eg)…</p>
<p>I’ll answer the home use questions…</p>
<p>I use the OpenOffice version for the Mac. My most-used spreadsheets are 1.) budgeting – tracking our billpayer account; 2.) The Spreadsheet (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/496268-measure-my-impending-insanity-pre-college-spreadsheet.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/496268-measure-my-impending-insanity-pre-college-spreadsheet.html</a>); 3.) Christmas shopping/gift-giving.</p>
<p>Of the two, the billpayer tracking spreadsheet gets much more use than the others. I usually figure the year’s budget at one time, plan it out, and then throughout the year, color-code which bills have cleared and which have not. Of course there are adjustments that have to be made, too, as the year passes. </p>
<p>The Christmas spreadsheet for the year starts whenever I start my Christmas shopping (which would be … ummmm… this past Saturday for the upcoming holiday, but only because something was on sale that will keep, I swear!! I usually start in October.) and is used to track orders (I do most of my shopping online), expenditures (see billpaying above), and who gets what.</p>
<p>Work is just too many to mention, so I won’t!</p>
<p>In a (somewhat?) related topic…</p>
<p>Anyone care to share the categories they use on a spreadsheet to evaluate the college admission process? Son wants to create one, and it would be wonderful to just take a peek at the categories that others used, so we didn’t forget anything.</p>
<p>Right now I’ have things scrawled in a notebook – at least it’s a start… :-)</p>
<p>^^^ There have been threads on this. Maybe start with the link owlice mentioned and/or search Spreadsheets in the Parent Forum.</p>
<p>We’ve all confessed :eek:.</p>
<p>“At home, I use Excel for tracking my money.”</p>
<p>MS Money or some other Finance software would do a better job. I use MS Money and the thing I like is that I can set up auto-pay feature (not really pay, but let the program thinks it pays). That way, every month I just have to change the amount. Nice graph and expense reporting functions.</p>
<p>I started using it about 7 years ago, and made a habit of entering most of the expenses. After about 3-4 years I was able to pretty accurately know how much money I need in retirement.</p>
<p>Thanks, jmmom—will check it out! :-)</p>
<p>I agree with Simba on tracking personal or business finances. I use Quicken.</p>
<p>So much more available with that type of application than in a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>I think I’ve used them ALL at one time or another over the years (including a few mainframe versions) but we have Excel through work so …</p>
<p>In addition to family finances I use Spreadsheets for taxes, spending and cost projects, modeling, and reporting on Estates and Trusts. Spreadsheets aren’t the best choice for speed or reliability, but people are generally comfortable with reports in spreadsheet form so it’s a good choice for communication purposes. It sure beats “Since income and spending are unidirectional, time-streamed and subject to variable permutations along the time line, I chose a multi-threaded, parallel, vector-based program for this analysis.”</p>
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<p>Sure there may be other things that work better, but those cost money 
I got Excel when I bought Office 2007 so it works great ;)</p>
<p>I currently don’t have any “normal” payments. Gas, food, and Ebay purchases make up most of my purchases.</p>
<p>Check out something called “Open Office”. It’s a freeware group of programs that mirrors the functionality of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. And the files it creates can be opened and viewed by anyone using the MS Office product line.</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.openoffice.org/product/]Link[/url”>http://www.openoffice.org/product/]Link[/url</a>]</p>
<p>I use Excel and have used it since the beginning when it was a single worksheet tab…probably in the early 1990s. I use it for financial calculations. (I work in Retirement Planning.) I use VBA for macros (Visual Basic for Applications) and have lots of fun developing user friendly templates. I mostly use the financial, string, logical and mathematical functions. Excel is a very powerful tool.</p>