Using the Excel Sheet

Once you’ve downloaded the todo sheet, you can then start playing around with it. Here’s a couple of pointers:

Working on an existing item

If you have an existing item, you can enter some information to report what you have been working on. The “update column” (Column G) will be automatically updated with the current timestamp to show when the last changes were made.

Something I like to do at the start of the day is go through my open items and decide if I’m going to try to do them today or at a later date. If I change the “due column” to today, the status column will get a red background. If the item is open but due at a future date, the background will be yellow. Once you complete an item and change its status to “done”, the background color will be removed (i.e. “white”).

Adding a new item

If you have something new to do and want to add a new item, just start typing in the first empty line. Once you leave the cell, the rest of the line will be properly set up by the code. For example, the id and status columns will be set up, the new column will be set to the current date and the status (with its conditional formatting) will be set to “open”. You can just enter the information you want to capture.

Filtering

Once you’ve completed the items for a while (the default is three days, but you can change that in the code), there is no longer a need to show this item. The sheet uses Excel’s Autofilter to display just the items that are still relevant. For the keyboard users, there is a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-A (for “Autofilter”) to automatically update the autofilter and only display the relevant items (i.e. those with a value in the Relevance column of “current”). Another feature is that items that I plan to do in the further future (next month, next year, …) get a relevance of “future” and aren’t displayed until the due date comes nearer.

Send Mail

The sheet is just an Excel sheet, so there is not much “web-type” functionality. As I’m mainly working at home (with my home todos) or at work (with the work todos), this has not been much of a problem for me. If I need my home todos at work, I can send all items due today in an email by hitting the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-M (for “Mail”).

Even though there is not much functionality in the sheet, I have found this sheet to be very useful in keeping tracks of what needs to be done. I have added some little things over time, but the code has been very stable in the last years. I hope you’ll like the sheet as well .. let me know if you have ideas for further improvements.

Next: Coding Overview.