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Spreadsheet Championships

24

Comments

  • cfw1994
    cfw1994 Posts: 2,166 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Hung up my suit! Name Dropper
    I was a regular user of Quicken from the days before Quicken 2000 👀
    I moved to Mac as a platform many years ago, but kept a virtual machine running Win7 *just* so I could keep Quicken running our fiscal lives….….then it eventually became time to upgrade the Mac (over 10 years old), & the new ones wouldn’t run my virtual machine 😔

    I created my own Google Sheets “Quicken”, and have a worksheet for each account (we have a few!) 💪
    A bit more manual, a bit harder to do reporting, but using google sheets makes it easy to access from anything - laptop, tablet, phone.
    About a year in, & we haven’t gone overdrawn or bust, so everything is good 😂

    Plan for tomorrow, enjoy today!
  • Roger175
    Roger175 Posts: 303 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    edited 27 September at 8:42AM
    My spreadsheet is incredible (in my humble opinion), started in 1999, it tracks our net worth on a monthly basis and lists where every £ has ever been. Every account, be it our SIPPs, S&S ISAs, cash ISAs, savings etc are on a separate line and as accounts get closed, I simply close (hide) the line (using grouping function in the data tab), but not deleting it. Thereby, by un-grouping the closed lines, I could tell you where every single £ of ours was in say May 2005 or any date required. 

    It also tracks month-on-month changes and year-on-year changes, so you can see your progress between say Sept 2025 and Sept 2005 (or any month/year of my choosing). This I find a real comfort blanket and it's what has given me the encouragement to keep plugging away over the years. Sometimes, things seem tough in the short term, especially in recessionary times, but when you can see the bigger picture it really helps stay focussed. I might think 'damn it! we're down £20k in the last year', but then you look at the spreadsheet and this shows we're up say £300k in the last 10 years and you suddenly don't feel so bad, and of course it all balances out and keeps rising in the long term.
  • JoeCrystal
    JoeCrystal Posts: 3,381 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    How often do you back up your sheets? I also got the Google spreadsheet, which I monitor my numbers but the thought of losing access is always at the back of my mind,
  • Triumph13
    Triumph13 Posts: 2,047 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper I've been Money Tipped!
    As always, XKCD nailed it:
    https://xkcd.com/1667/
  • ali_bear
    ali_bear Posts: 433 Forumite
    Third Anniversary 100 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    LibreOffice all the way. 
    A little FIRE lights the cigar
  • Roger175
    Roger175 Posts: 303 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    How often do you back up your sheets? I also got the Google spreadsheet, which I monitor my numbers but the thought of losing access is always at the back of my mind,
    I keep my Excel spreadsheet on my Google Drive, so I can access it anywhere from any device and no risk of loosing it if it was on one laptop.
  • sausage_time
    sausage_time Posts: 1,589 Ambassador
    Tenth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    I used sc on Unix in the 1980s (the documents still open!). Now I use LibreOffice mainly with Google Sheets for a few things I like to have on my mobile.  Some of the LibreOffice sheets originally came from Excel and work well (including some Visual Basic).  All the usual financial planning and tracking.

    Desktop files are backed up to Google Drive using rclone several times a week, and monthly to a USB drive.
    I’m a Forum Ambassador and I support the Forum Team on the Credit CardsSavings & investments, and Budgeting & Bank Accounts boards. If you need any help on these boards, do let me know. Please note that Ambassadors are not moderators. Any posts you spot in breach of the Forum Rules should be reported via the report button, or by emailing forumteam@moneysavingexpert.com.
    All views are my own and not the official line of MoneySavingExpert.
  • leosayer
    leosayer Posts: 706 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    I vaguely remember using Symphony for creating spreadsheets on a pre-windows pc in the early 90s.

    It was a bloody nightmare.

  • ukdw
    ukdw Posts: 349 Forumite
    Ninth Anniversary 100 Posts Name Dropper
    edited 28 September at 6:50AM
    cfw1994 said:
    I was a regular user of Quicken from the days before Quicken 2000 👀
    I moved to Mac as a platform many years ago, but kept a virtual machine running Win7 *just* so I could keep Quicken running our fiscal lives….….then it eventually became time to upgrade the Mac (over 10 years old), & the new ones wouldn’t run my virtual machine 😔

    I created my own Google Sheets “Quicken”, and have a worksheet for each account (we have a few!) 💪
    A bit more manual, a bit harder to do reporting, but using google sheets makes it easy to access from anything - laptop, tablet, phone.
    About a year in, & we haven’t gone overdrawn or bust, so everything is good 😂

    I also used Quicken98 until 2020.
    I even managed to get it to work for a while on a mac using wine I think, and it mostly still runs ok on  my Dads Windows10 machine.

    During lockdown I wrote a basic quicken version with the features I used like reconcilation /net worth/Categories/regular transactions in nodejs and am still using it to track all accounts, and reconcile down to exact amounts.

    It has a single register for all accounts in the background, plus I backloaded about 30 years worth of quicken data into it - so its sometimes useful to do a search spanning back a long way in the past.

    The change over to a lot more smaller contactless transactions rather than cash, plus the move away from receipts for every transaction changed the way I enter a lot of the transactions though.

    It is handy though also like your google sheets approach being able to access the accounts from anywhere.




  • Ibrahim5
    Ibrahim5 Posts: 1,292 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper
    Loved VisiCalc myself.
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