Spreadsheet
In which I spend all morning messing with spreadsheets again. :P
Basically, I took my old wordcount tracking spreadsheet and made it a lot prettier, more functional and more elegant. So at that point I figured I might as well share it.
Words by Story Spreadsheet (click to download)
This spreadsheet is designed for people who want to track their writing goals for a year primarily by story rather than by date. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kate's awesome 2012 Wordtracker spreadsheet does everything you need for by tracking by date anyway.) It's also designed for fanfic writers, people who tend to have a lot of different stories on the go at once, and people who like to watch the numbers dance. :D (Last year I found I was way more motivated by "watch the numbers dance" than "I made daily wordcount.")
Basics for using this spreadsheet: It's an Open Document Spreadsheet, which means it works natively with OpenOffice, LibreOffice, StarOffice, or pretty much any other open source office suite of your choice. (It will only partly work in GoogleDocs, and probably only partly works in Excel - they choke on the array formulas, which means most of the fancier statistics give errors. But the basic stuff will still work.)
Every time you work on a new story, you insert a new row at the top, and then fill in the columns for that row. If you update a previously worked on story, just change the values that have changed. Gray-background cells are automatically calculated and you should not type anything in them unless you know what you're doing with the formulas.
The "carryover wordcount" column is meant for WIPs that carried over from last year - fill it in with the pre-2012 wordcount, and keep the multiyear total in the main wordcount box. The spreadsheet will use the multiyear total for the story-related statistics, but subtract it out when calculating this year's total and average wordcounts. If a work doesn't carryover to other years, just leave it blank. (You can leave any cells blank.)
If you don't want to track the same things I want to, all of the Y/N columns other than "Finished?" and "Posted?" can be repurposed for any other yes/no thing you want to track; just change the label at the head of the column and the labels on the relevant statistics cells, and the calculations should keep working with a new meaning. Also, you can add as many more columns to the end as you can stand.
If you want to track time spent per story, every time you add a new row you will have to manually "fill down" the last two gray columns in the story section, the ones that track days in progress and words by day; I don't know any way to make the formulas automatically fill in on new rows. (One more note on those columns: "days in progress" calculates from the first day you worked on it until today; "words per day" only calculates from the first day you worked on it until the last day you worked on it, which is why they might not seem to line up.)
It's also hardcoded for 2012, so if you want to use it other years, the formulas in B25, B31 and B32 will need to be updated.
(Also I needed a 2012-only story to test it with, so I posted the silly Sherlock thing from t'other day to AO3. I now have fics up titled "Inconceivable" and "Unbelievable". Clearly I need to come up with a story for "Irretrievable".)
Basically, I took my old wordcount tracking spreadsheet and made it a lot prettier, more functional and more elegant. So at that point I figured I might as well share it.
Words by Story Spreadsheet (click to download)
This spreadsheet is designed for people who want to track their writing goals for a year primarily by story rather than by date. (
kate's awesome 2012 Wordtracker spreadsheet does everything you need for by tracking by date anyway.) It's also designed for fanfic writers, people who tend to have a lot of different stories on the go at once, and people who like to watch the numbers dance. :D (Last year I found I was way more motivated by "watch the numbers dance" than "I made daily wordcount.")Basics for using this spreadsheet: It's an Open Document Spreadsheet, which means it works natively with OpenOffice, LibreOffice, StarOffice, or pretty much any other open source office suite of your choice. (It will only partly work in GoogleDocs, and probably only partly works in Excel - they choke on the array formulas, which means most of the fancier statistics give errors. But the basic stuff will still work.)
Every time you work on a new story, you insert a new row at the top, and then fill in the columns for that row. If you update a previously worked on story, just change the values that have changed. Gray-background cells are automatically calculated and you should not type anything in them unless you know what you're doing with the formulas.
The "carryover wordcount" column is meant for WIPs that carried over from last year - fill it in with the pre-2012 wordcount, and keep the multiyear total in the main wordcount box. The spreadsheet will use the multiyear total for the story-related statistics, but subtract it out when calculating this year's total and average wordcounts. If a work doesn't carryover to other years, just leave it blank. (You can leave any cells blank.)
If you don't want to track the same things I want to, all of the Y/N columns other than "Finished?" and "Posted?" can be repurposed for any other yes/no thing you want to track; just change the label at the head of the column and the labels on the relevant statistics cells, and the calculations should keep working with a new meaning. Also, you can add as many more columns to the end as you can stand.
If you want to track time spent per story, every time you add a new row you will have to manually "fill down" the last two gray columns in the story section, the ones that track days in progress and words by day; I don't know any way to make the formulas automatically fill in on new rows. (One more note on those columns: "days in progress" calculates from the first day you worked on it until today; "words per day" only calculates from the first day you worked on it until the last day you worked on it, which is why they might not seem to line up.)
It's also hardcoded for 2012, so if you want to use it other years, the formulas in B25, B31 and B32 will need to be updated.
(Also I needed a 2012-only story to test it with, so I posted the silly Sherlock thing from t'other day to AO3. I now have fics up titled "Inconceivable" and "Unbelievable". Clearly I need to come up with a story for "Irretrievable".)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I would love to see yours though! Who doesn't love spreadsheets?
no subject
no subject
no subject
I deleted mine from 2011 somehow (the completed one), I lost all my information, which is possibly why I didn't post the template this year. I posted it last year - here is my 2011 template (.xls). Yeah, I don't see the point in switching formats either - I mean, maybe if I was making it for more people, but I was just making it for me, you know?
Anyway - yours is probably way nicer, mine was just a little whatever whatever, you know?
no subject
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-01-10 07:40 pm (UTC)(link)Also, thank you melannen, that spreadsheet is really useful.