excel-lent

Screw humility - I make epic spreadsheets =P

Backstory:

I was worried that my Zenbook had shitty battery life - at school I was getting battery life of like 2-3 hours on battery saver mode.
Then I realised I should've known enough about electronics than to expect stellar battery life right out of the box.
Open CCleaner to check when the default programs were installed onto this computer, the super deep system files were from 31/Mar/2011, and the programs installed just prior to commercial shipping were installed mid Oct/2011. [Hence why I received the relatively shitty Sentelic touchpad, as it started shipping with Elan sometime in November. It's not too bad, actually. Not as bad as the Internet would have it. Just the fact you can't turn it off very easily is stupid as fuck.]
So anyways this laptop sat nicely in its box for a good half-year. I ripped it out of its box one fateful day and in retrospect, 2-3 hours isn't half bad :L.
At home I had the epiphany that I should cycle this shit, so I did. Of course I felt obliged to monitor my progress, so I set up a battery log.

The Spreadsheet:

I kinda feel like uploading it, but at the same time I know spreadsheeting isn't something people value as much as, say, Photoshop skills and so I'm like meh whatevs.

But I'll have you know I used (relatively) impressive formulae like

=IF(E5="sleep", 0, H6*24*60)
=AVERAGEIF(Table1[Active Minutes], ">0",Table1[Battery Drop (%/min)])
=IFERROR(G3/(I3/60),"-")

I'll explain those three formulae above for funzies

• The first one detects whether I specified the computer was in sleep mode for that time. If it was, the cell will display 0. If it was not in sleep mode, it will convert column H from time formatted cells to a numerical number of minutes.
• The second one checks the column "Active Minutes" (that's what I called total number of minutes - sleep time). As long as there are more than 0 active minutes for each time bracket, I take the average of my column "Battery Drop". If there are 0 active minutes for one row, that row's data is disregarded (I did this because otherwise my average battery life calculations would be way higher than actual values)
• The last one is because I have the same formula for each column of cells, the first one will usually have nothing to subtract, or divide by zero. So to make the cell be pretty and not read the dreaded #DIV/0! or #VALUE!, the formula will detect any errors and just substitute in a dash.

Okay in the grand scale of things it's pretty scrub spreadsheeting, and I still don't know how to use more than 80% of Excel's formulae (and probably never will - too much statistical maths that I'll never learn), but it's so satisfying to be able to plug in time and battery level, and have calculations like "Estimated hours/100%" and "Battery drop %/hour" plus a line graph(!!) just pop up magically.
And seeing as most people are impressed when I replicate formulae down a column, or even when I use formulae (?!!), I feel pretty good :P


By the way, if I complained to anyone about my keyboard - I'm used to it now! No longer dropping letters, and I quite like how the keys feel when I press down on them. I am, however, realising this text is a little too small for extended periods of reading. Movies and touchtyping it is :P

Anyways, ultimate obnoxious post over, I hope I may find something else interesting to blog about soon.