Excel Geek

I am an engineer or geek by trade. One of my favorite toys, err, I mean tools, is Microsoft Excel. I use it for all sorts of calculations and even when I discovered my new company didn't have any stormwater analysis software, I wrote a spread sheet that modeled a 20-year, 24-hour storm on a street I designed.

But in my free time I track all sorts of geeky stuff in Excel. My biggest spreadsheet tracks football and basketball statistics for Mountain West Conference (MWC) teams and schools that are expansion possibilities for the conference.

By there are two spreadsheets on my wish list, that I haven't figured out to put them together. One is a spread sheet that looks at college basketball and football attendance to ascertain what is the key attribute to higher visiting attendance. Attendance is money and if you can statistically show which attributes contribute most significantly to higher attendance, then you could best target schools to add to your conference.

The second spread sheet also has to do with a new feature I added to my blog and that is my iTunes listening. I love music and was thrilled when my wife surprised me with an ipod Nano last year for Christmas. The only downside I saw was that I would not longer be able to track which songs I listened to most often, because I would be listening on my ipod instead of on iTunes. But my sister informed me that even though a play count isn't shown on my ipod Nano, it nevertheless tracks how many times I have listened to each song and down loads that data to the host computer every time you sync. So my blog now has my Top Ten most played songs in iTunes that I will update periodically.

But I wish I could export that data into a spread sheet so I could track which songs I have listened to the most in the last month, or how many cumulative hours of listening have I done. I was a little surprised to find that most of my Top Ten were by Radiohead and none were by Kent, who I would consider to be my favorite band. Is Radiohead really my favorite band to listen to, but I consider Kent my favorite because it reminds me of Sweden? Perhaps I listen to more Kent cumulatively, but my favorite songs are by Radiohead.

Great News. Before I posted this I thought I would double check to make sure there isn't a way to export the data, and it turns out that you can. I will have to tinker with the formatting and it will take time to setup a spreadsheet, but I should be able to check that off my wish list, and in so doing, I sink lower into geekdom.