How to do just about anything with software you already have
Most people have access to a spreadsheet program. Microsoft bundles Excel into its Office suite, OpenOffice has Calc, Google Docs has “spreadsheets”, and so on. For a great many people, however, the spreadsheet program is one they never open. Many people, even if they do use spreadsheets, consider them to be some sort of infinitely large table and not much good for anything else.
Despite popular opinion, though, spreadsheets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They’re the Swiss Army knife of the software world. People sometimes either buy an expensive, specialized program or simply do without when all they really need is a spreadsheet and a little creativity. As examples, I have in the past made spreadsheets that graphically illustrated available space on library shelves, calculated a variety of monthly statistics quickly and easily, extracted data from emails, verified d