Excel is actually an excellent vehicle for tracking activity but the problem
is most people only have a superficial knowledge of Excel. After inputting all
the line info, I'm able to do summarizations by time period, casino, game, or
whatever attribute I want & each summarization takes less than a minute.
Naturally, I've gone beyond the run-of-the-mill usage.
For most of you who don't want to get too deep into Excel's power, there is
one feature that you can easily use right now without having to know much about
Excel. It's called "Autofilter". Select "Data" then "Filter" & you'll see it.
This assumes that you've set the spreadsheet up so that column headings are
casino, game, denomination, etc. and rows are the dates of each session. (It
makes no sense to reverse this as there are only 256 columns vs 65,000+ rows.)
Before you use it, make a copy of your current spreadsheet & play with the
copy using Autofilter. When you turn Autofilter on, you'll see drop-down arrows
showing you each unique element in that column. Play with making a few
selections. Autofilter, by itself, doesn't change any data, just reorganizes it.
However, I want you to play with the copy so that you don't blame me when you
somehow change the data. To turn Autofilter off, select Data, Filter, Autofilter.
Yes, it's a toggle.
To get to the quick summarization procedure, learn how to use Pivot Tables.
If the table is set up properly, you can literally summarize multiple
attributes very quickly. For instance, you can run a cross-table showing casino, game,
denomination, etc. in less than a minute. If you don't like it, it will
probably take another minute to change it. For those of you who are stat nuts, there
are powerful statistical tools which not only rival SPSS but, combined with
Excel's ability to manipulate data, makes it the tool of choice in most cases.
Re my own spreadsheet, sorry I will not share my work nor am I interested in
anyone else's. In this regard, I have a closed mind but that's because I'd
rather spend my free time trying to play VP.
I will give you one tip though. Most of us create this log to satisfy
tax-reporting requirements. It's just a little bit more effort to turn it into a
performance-analysis tool.
In a message dated 1/19/2004 11:11:57 AM Pacific Standard Time,
vpFREE@yahoogroups.com writes:
Happy New Year to everybody.
My husband and I are trying to keep records of our VP sessions. For
a
past year we used excel spreadsheet to keep the log, but now when
it's time to do tax we realized that format (created by us) is
really
nor friendly and it will take us a lot of time to do some kind of
summarization. We also realized that we did not properly map the
column for comps, gifts, promotions, etc.. We would very appreciate
if somebody would help us and maybe share with us the format he/she
is using to log VP sessions. The biggest problem is, that we (I
primarily since I maintain the log) do not want to use diary and
prefer to use PC for any type of "writing".Thanks
Ellen & Yan>>>
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<<<--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "yglozman" <ellengl@e...> wrote: