The 2021 holiday season is officially upon us here in the United States which means it’s time for my annual gift giving guide. I used to panic every year whenever my spouse, parents, and siblings asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I needed to give them an idea otherwise I’d end up with an ugly sweater or some random gadget I would never use.
So to help alleviate some of my stress I started compiling my own holiday gift guide. It’s kind of like the big toy catalog you used to get as a kid, only this is for adults. I’ve made a list of items I think would be very useful or exciting for your fellow Excel users, sorted by different categories (and yes, this post does contain Amazon affiliate links). Some of these items I already use on a daily basis and others are things that are on my own personal wish list. It's my biggest and best gift guide yet! Enjoy!
Not sure if this is helpful to anyone but I made a COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracking document in Excel. It’s hard to make a
spreadsheet that you’re probably not going to use personally yourself. But I
tried to envision being in management of a company or nursing home or school
that needed to:
(1) prioritize which employees or residents or teachers should
get the vaccine first and
(2) track which people have actually gotten the
vaccine and when.
What Order to Distribute the Vaccine
The first item I tackled was how do you decide in what order
to give out the vaccine. Knowing that supplies are limited, who gets the first
dose?
I use a scoring system to decide the priority order: the
highest score is first in line to get their shots.
Here’s how the score is
calculated:
Age:
the score starts with the person’s age. 30 years old = 30 points. The
older population automatically has a higher score.
Age
multiplier: I made up a tier system based on age. Based on earlier data
I’ve seen, the chance of dying from COVID if you’re 59 years or younger is
only around 1% or less, but this jumps up to nearly 20% if you’re 80 or
older. In my scoring system, those 60 and older get varying amounts of
“bonus” points added to their score depending on what age range tier they
fall into.
Priority
person: Yeah, you could just rank vaccination order by age and be done
with it but I didn’t want age to be the only limiting factor. There are
other variables that I wanted to account for. I added the ability for a
person to be marked as “high priority”, maybe due to immune deficiency or
because they’re a first responder, or pregnant – whatever you want it to
be. This adds 11 points to their score to help bump them up in the
distribution order. Again, the spreadsheet is easily customizable so you can change the bonus to whatever value fits your needs.
Male
or female: This might be controversial, but I added a segment to the
scoring where males get a slight score increase over females. From the
data I have (and please send me any new information if you think I’m
wrong) males have a ~3% higher death rate from COVID than females (women
are generally better at fighting off infections I’ve heard) so they get +3
point bonus while females get none. Of course, feel free to change this
setting to make it what you want. Give woman 1,000 bonus points and men 0
– it’s up to you and can be easily changed in the spreadsheet.
The total score is calculated by adding up the age, the age
tier multiplier, the male/female bonus, and the priority bump. The biggest
factor is age, as that is the biggest factor of death rate. While getting the
highest score means you’re first in line to get the vaccine, that also means
you have the highest risk of dying from COVID.I then use the RANK function in Excel to rank the individuals from highest
to lowest score. There’s your priority list of who gets the vaccine first.
Vaccine Distribution Tracking
The next component, after deciding the vaccination order, is
to then track if these people actually got the vaccine. Complicating matters,
there are (right now) two different vaccines being distributed in the US
requiring two separate doses and the time between doses is different. Each
vaccine also has a minimum age requirement that is different so there is a
formula to make sure the individual is old enough to get the selected vaccine.
If they’re not eligible, meaning you’re too young, your score automatically
goes to 0 and I use condition formatting to turn the cells black to show the
individual shouldn’t be scheduled to get a shot. Once you get the first dose,
enter the date and the spreadsheet will tell you when the earliest is you can
get the second dose based on which vaccine you got. Finally, you can quickly
see how many of your employees or residents have received the first or second
doses of the vaccine.
I’ve been wanting to put my Excel powers to good use rather
than just making Super Bowl squares or football related spreadsheets. Not sure
the legality of it but if I was in charge of a company with employees working
from home I would want to know when it is safe to bring that back into the
office. Try it out and let me know what you think!
Year in Pixels is a cool idea I recently saw on Pinterest and decided I would make an Excel template for it to help save you the time of having to make your own using pencil and grid paper. Each day of an entire year is given one square or “pixel” and after every day you color in what your mood was for that day. It’s a great way to track your well-being to get a visual representation for how your year is going.
At the end of the year you’ll be able to answer the questions: How many days a year am I really happy or how many bad days do I experience in a year? Too many bad days in a row means it’s time to make a change.
During a day you may experience a wide variety of feelings. This chart doesn’t go that deep, it’s more what the culmination of everything is: was it a good day, an OK day, or a bad day?
The template is modifiable. You can change the colors if you want: I’ve decided to go with warm for happy feelings and cold for sad feelings. You can also change the number of colors/moods you want to track. I’ve gone with just five for now.
There are multiple sheets included within my template: a printable version, an Excel (electronic) version, and an example.
The printable version is for you old fashioned folks who want to print it out and color in the squares by hand with markers, crayons, or colored pencils. Feel free to hang it on the fridge or somewhere visible where you won’t forget to fill it out every day.
Personally, I prefer the Excel version because then I can do other things with it, like automatically sum up the total number of good versus bad days to know exactly what my percentages are.
See how easy it is to use the Year in Pixels template by watching the video below:
This template uses drop down lists, conditional formatting, and nested IF formulas. If you’re not sure what any of those are, I highly recommend downloading the sheet and taking a look at how it works.
Happy New Year! I've made a few updates to the Pixel Year spreadsheet. First, I switched the format from xlsx to xlsm so I could add a macro. This way you can change the colors from the default to whatever you want at the click of a button. I also added a Yearly sheet so you can track your average and number of days for each category for each year and compare your years. See how I made the updates in the video below. Download link is the same.
Now you can track your mood in Excel with the Year in Pixels spreadsheet. Let me know in the comments below if you’re going to use it this year!
I am happy to announce I am now a proud father! I'm never been so tired yet so happy in my entire life! While at the hospital we had to keep a Newborn Feeding and Diaper Log. As soon as we got home and the baby was napping I decided to recreate the log as a usable spreadsheet and have made it available to all you other new parents for free. Use the log to keep track of feeding and diaper changing times; whether it was breastfeeding or bottle; if it was just urine or stool plus any other notes and observations. Keeping track of your baby's feeding and changing schedule is a great way to make sure they are growing and thriving as they should be. Take the log to your doctor's office during checkups and you won't have to rack your brain to remember any of these details.
I suggest printing it off and keeping a copy next to the changing table or rocking chair like I have. I just can’t wrap my head around how something so small creates so much poop! Thank goodness I signed up for Amazon Mom and setup a weekly diaper delivery at a discounted rate. Download my newborn checklist for new parents and other spreadsheets related to health, babies, parenting, and more.
Sorry for the lack of posts recently (besides sports spreadsheets) but the reason is because I’ve been getting ready for something big, something exciting, something life-altering: my wife and I are expecting our first child next month! We’re super stoked to be having a son but anxious at the same time. We’ve been working hard at getting everything ready but I can’t help thinking, “what if we’ve forgotten something important?” There have been so many things to do and there are so many things yet to do. How does a new parent keep it all organized? My solution is to use an Excel spreadsheet of course!
In order to keep myself organized and to help other future parents I’ve put together what I hope is the ultimate newborn checklist in Excel. This master file is composed of four separate sheets (I imagine I'll probably add more in the future too):
Things to do BEFORE the Baby is Born
The first sheet is a getting ready for baby checklist. It includes a list of things you should do before your baby is born and how soon before the due date they should be completed by.
Baby Registry Checklist
The next sheet in the file is the baby registry checklist. You can use this for a baby shower checklist or for a list of things you need before the baby arrives.
Hospital Bag Checklist
A list of what to pack for the hospital that you can easily print off if you would like.
Things to Do After the Baby is Born checklist
Another checklist of things that need to be done after the baby is born.
Behind the scenes so to speak, the newborn checklist spreadsheet uses named ranges, data validation to create lists, conditional formatting to color cells based on text, IF formulas, concatenate formulas, data filtering, and more. You’re free to poke around the spreadsheet if you want to see how it works or you don’t have to deal with any of that if you don’t want to and simply fill in the information or print it off.
My goal is to make this the ultimate resource for new parents. I’ve tried to include everything such as what to pack in hospital bag for mom. Tasks can be assigned to husband or wife. I also included some links to some services that can help you save money, like Amazon Mom. Believe me guys, your wives will be very impressed and happy if you use this list and actually help her prepare (yay brownies points). Download the spreadsheet for free using the link below.
I’ve revamped my Apartment Comparison Spreadsheet website and the big news is you can now download the Apartment Search Spreadsheet for free! Signup for the Apartment Search Tips newsletter and you’ll immediately receive the link to download my apartment hunting tool. You can unsubscribe from the email list at anytime but if you’re looking for an apartment I recommend you don’t unsubscribe so you can get my valuable tips, like how to potentially earn $100 for signing a new lease!
The Apartment Search Spreadsheet can also be used as an apartment search checklist as I listed almost every criteria you could think of for what you would like in a new apartment. Enter the data for every apartment you are looking at. Next, you’ll set an importance factor for several categories. What’s more important to you - size of the rooms or distance to work? The spreadsheet uses your inputs to give each apartment a score and you can easily see which apartment has the highest score and is thus the best choice for you.
Please note, the free preview version of the spresdsheet for apartment comparison only allows you to compare two apartments. You'll have to purchase the PRO version to compare more than two apartments, but it also comes with a lot of extra resources you might enjoy. Check it out here. And please do let me know if you find this tool at all useful or if you think it would be great if there were something like this for another item, like to compare houses or cars.
The
Glasgow Coma Scale (or GCS) aims to give a reliable way of recording the
conscious state or a person for assessment. Many of my recent posts have centered
on sports (especially football spreadsheets) so today I thought I would go
in a completely different direction. One area I have never touched on in this
blog is the medical profession and how Excel is used in hospitals and
rehabilitation centers. The Glasgow scale is used in the field of therapeutic
recreation, among others.
The GCS scale
is broken down into three main behaviors or activities: Eye Opening (E), Motor
Responses (M), and Verbal Responses (V). Each of these behaviors can be rated
based on some predefined criteria. Each criterion is given a point value from
one to six. To obtain the final GCS coma score
simply add the results from the three previous behaviors (Summed Glasgow Coma
Scale Score= E+M+V). The final score should fall between 3 and 15 points where
a score of 8 is the midpoint. Any Glasgow Coma score below the midpoint shows
serious damage.
I
have made a blank template of the GCS scale which you can download and print
out for free.
On a
related note, you can also read about and download a template
for the Ranchos Los Amigos Scale which is also known as the Level of Cognitive
Functioning Scale or LCFS. LCFS is a medical scale used to assess individuals
after a closed head injury.
Is this
information helpful to you? Would you like to see more health and human
services related Excel templates and forms? Please feel free to comment below
or Tweet me and let me know your thoughts. Your feedback will only help make
this blog better.
