the funny thing about spreadsheets is that they never seem to be finished.

i can’t say that libreoffice is the most user friendly and bug free piece of software that i’ve ever used, but i’ve had issues with apple numbers, microsoft excel, and a couple others.

that said, it has filled the need.

its functions allowed me to create named ranges (arrays of data) from which i created the drop down picklists. don’t expect the hiking tab to work properly if loaded into another spreadsheet application. google docs does a fair job of reading the values and formatting. i expect that excel would choke on/not recognize the named ranges. i tried apache openoffice and it did not work.

conditional formatting was used to have the units appear next to values and still have the ability to use the value as a number in formulas. it’s easy to concatenate a letter to end of the value, but then mathematical functions don’t work without some additional tinkering.

here is version 1.5 of my gear checklist. i’ve simplified a few things and “fixed” some other things.

use as you will. modify, copy, redistribute, share, etc.

have fun.

from this website: hiking gear checklist v1.5 (zip file)

from google drive: hiking gear checklist v1.5

 

 

 

Published On: 2023 April 24

2 Comments

  1. Nathan G. 2023 April 24 at 2:29 pm - Reply

    Nice work!

    I tried to switch over to Apache OpenOffice back around 2015, when it seemed that MS Office was no longer included with the purchase of a computer. It worked okay (at best) for me, but the UI just wasn’t quite what I was used to (MS products). I eventually just went to Google docs, and have been happy with the little bit I’ve had to use it at home. Seems like it does just what I need it to do, without too much extra.

    Still use MS at work, but for the simple stuff at home, Google Docs is it.

    • clint 2023 April 24 at 5:45 pm - Reply

      thanks.

      apache openoffice is not quite a polished as libreoffice. i agree that neither ui is really well laid out or intuitive. i looked at doing this spreadsheet in google docs, but the necessary functions to create the data arrays and then do lookups for the drop down menus wasn’t there. or i couldn’t find it. openoffice didn’t have it in their spreadsheet app either. numbers (the apple spreadsheet) is kind of joke (as far as functions goes), so that was a no go. there’s also neooffice specifically for the mac which is a port of libreoffice, but i found that to be buggier than the libreoffice version for mac. that was some while ago. things might have changed. i have not tested this spreadsheet in neooffice. by far, excel is the most powerful of the bunch. me and another guy created some really sophisticated spreadsheets back in the day using the visual basic that is/was built into excel. like mini applications in spreadsheet form. crappy part was when excel got upgraded and it broke the code. trying to troubleshoot that was a nightmare. glad i don’t have to mess with that corporate stuff anymore and get to create beautiful spreadsheet works of art for free and can give them away. ;-) i really do enjoy it. that’s all that matters

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