Horse Racing: Breeders' Cup Data

Steven Crist of the Daily Racing Form, uses spreadsheets very effectively to share horse racing data with "some links to get you in the mood". The Breeders' Cup is the latest target on this featured blog post ... "The two links below are what we'll be using all week as continuing work-in-progress Breeders' Cup scratch sheets. Right now they're just the pre-entries in alphabetical order by race".

Site: Daily Racing Form
Page/Post: Breeders' Cup Spreadsheet Links
Spreadsheets: Breeders' Cup 2007 Friday / Breeders' Cup 2007 Saturday

Baseball as a business

The Squawking Baseball blog posted a spreadsheet which seems to compile several different sources of data about the financial side of baseball. We can't endorse the accuracy of the data, but it's a good example of data sharing.

Site: Squawking baseball blog
Page/ Post: Benefits of (and need for) Aggragated Data
Spreadsheet: Forbes/Financial World Data (not sure if that name reflects the sources)

Biker's Training Diary and Plan

Colin Griffiths shares plenty of tidbits as a racing bicyclist on his blog - including a spreadsheet he used as a generalized training plan. You bikers out there might want to contact Colin and ask him to provide a link to the version you can save as your own.

Site: Colin Griffiths' Biking Bits
Page/Post: A Gerneralised Training Plan?
Spreadsheet: Training Plan

Beer Listings are now a trend on spreadsheets

I thought the prior beer tasting results spreadsheet we posted was just a cute, isolated example - but it seems to be a trend now. An active member/moderator of the Alcohol Report site - TrendKiller Z28 includes a link to a very well-populated Beer Listing spreadsheet in his signature... Last I looked, it had approximately 275 beers included! That's a lot of drinking...er... work!

Site: Alcohol Report
Page/Post: TrendKiller Z28's Profile
Spreadsheet: Beer List

Lord of The Rings Online Gamer Stuff

The gamers have really figured out how to effectively share the details about their favorite games using spreadsheets... Here's one for the Lord of The Rings online game.

Site: Lord Of the Rings Online
Page/Post: Optimal Traits for a Champ
Spreadsheet: Lord of the Rings Traits

Income Statements and Balance Sheets

Dayanand Menashi created the Annual Report Analysis blog to "analyze the annual reports of the businesses [in which he is] interested to invest". He Posted the Balance sheet and Income statement of Infosys in a recent post as part of this analysis... these are now good templates for people looking to use online spreadsheets to document their financial statements. (note: as with other posts here - we cannot confirm the validity of the information posted on these blogs or the related spreadsheets)

Site: Annual Report Analysis
Page/Post: Dissecting INFY's 2Q results
Spreadsheet: Infosys Financials

Book Reading Lists at Harvard Undergrad

Crimson Reading "...helps students save money and support charity by comparing the price of textbooks from online retailers.". They have an online database of book reading requirements across (all?) Harvard Undergrad courses, which is an interesting list to browse.

Site: Crimson Reading
Page/Post: Crimson Reading ISBN Database
Spreadsheet: Crimson Reading Open Source ISBN List

Calculating the efficiency of an Electric Car

A comment on the GM-Volt site (from Darren - Comment #45 on this post) included a link to this Electic Car Efficiency Calcuator. Darren ends his comment with: "My electricity would have to cost more than $0.225 CAD/kWh to make the volt more expensive to drive than a car getting 50MPG. However, it was mentioned before and I agree that they payback isn’t what’s going back into my wallet. The payback is the reduction of my carbon footprint and dependence on foreign oil while driving a car that doesn’t look like a suppository."

Site: GM-Volt Site
Page/Post: What will it cost to drive a Chevy Volt
Spreadsheet: Electric Car Efficiency Calculator

WiFi Hotspots in Erie PA

Global Erie blog posts this list of wifi Hotspots in their local area... in interesting example of using a public spreadsheet, especially if you open it up for editing by more people - so they can add hotspots as they find them.

Site: Global Erie Blog
Page/Post: Tech-Curve - Broadband WiFi
Spreadsheet: Erie PA WiFi Hotspots

Sports Data Consolidated and Shared - NBA

IGN Entertainment has some active message boards where this gem was found. If you're thinking of collaborating to publish some sports data, this is a great example. The formats are nice, the template for on-season data are ready to go (but empty for now), and seems to cover just about all aspects of the sport (Basketball in this case) - General Managers, Payroll/Salaries, Standings, Rankings, drafts, etc.

Site: IGN Boards - Basketball
Page/Post: IGN NBA Off-Season Thread
Spreadsheet: IGNBA 2K8 Master Spreadsheet

Boston Investors Share Stock Data

BostonIBD "is the online group for Boston, Massachusetts area IBD (Investors Business Daily) investors. Join this site to share knowledge about stock investing. We encourage free discussion about investing...". An interesting spreadsheet of the IBD100 stocks was posted to the Google Group where many people gather around this topic.

Site: Boston IBD Group
Page/Post: Public LInk to IBD100 Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet: Boston IBD Spreadsheet

Photo-sharing Sites Comparison

We've seen this done before - using a spreadsheet to compare products or services. This one compares photo-sharing sites... with the caveat that it was posted on a SmugMug forum, so possibly biased... but the example is good (and the data may or may not be).

Site: Indirectly found on Digital Media Thoughts Forums
Page/Post: Photo Site Comparison
Spreadsheet: Photo Site Comparison Spreadsheet

Better service records = better craigslist listing

Here's an idea that someone had - use a spreadsheet first to track their service record of their motorcycle... then publish that spreadsheet and link to it from his craigslist listing. Now that's transparency.

Site: Craigslist / Madison
Page/Post: 1980 Goldwing For Sale
Spreadsheet: 1980 Goldwing Service Record

Hybridizing Roses

If you know any rose gardeners, you know it can become quite a deep hobby. The ultimate level is actually hybridizing - growing new species by combining others. This is real genetic experimentation. The "ploidy database" is actually a set of spreadsheets showing stuff I can explain... I've included links to all 4 spreadsheets (which, arguably, should be distinct sheets within a single spreadsheet).

Site: Rose Hybridizers
Page/Post: Rose-Ploidy Database
Spreadsheets: diploids | Triploids | Tetraploids | Penta/Hexa/octoploids

Growing Tomatoes and tracking results

Earthbox is the self-described "Worlds most revolutionary gardening system". It is a "maintenance-free, award-winning, high-tech growing system controls soil conditions, eliminates guesswork and more than doubles the yield of a conventional garden-with less fertilizer, less water and virtually no effort." In the Forums, there is a discussion and spreadsheet regarding the tracking of results from growing different species of Tomatoes. While their data set isn't extensive (1 row per sheet?), it still is an interesting example for those more daring to collect results collaboratively.

Site: Earthbox
Page/Post: Forum - BER Topic Revisited
Spreadsheet: BER Results for Tomatoes

Tracking Fire & EMS Activity

Here's an interesting one... First, a great discussion with one user explaining to another (rather well) how to use spreadsheets to keep site data updated without worrying about html editing ("Yes, any changes you make to the spreadsheet (and publish) will be visible on the ScanMiamiValley.com web page without me having to do anything.")

Site: Scan Miami Valley
Page/Post: New Feeds Added
Spreadsheet: Frequencies, TalkGroups for Cuyahoga

Investing and tracking stock trades

WUGNET has a pretty broad mission: "Your Complete Resource Center for 'The Best' in Shareware, Computing Tips and Support, Windows Industry News... and much more!". Wow... Here's one corner of the forums where one user helped another to create a great stock investing spreadsheet...

Site: WUGNET
Page/Post: How to make a cell appear blank (that was the question posed)
Spreadsheet: Trading Spreadsheet (Get on that forum and ask this guy for a copy you can edit for yourself!)

Soccer Fan making it easier for others

There's a very active user (Mundial) on the BigSoccer Forums who keeps some great data for certan palyers on "Fulham" (I can't even tell you what league that is... England, I suspect). He's created and kept updated the detailed spreadsheet below for 4 key players.

Site: Big Soccer Forums
Page/Post: Player Logs (Fulham)
Spreadsheet: Fulham 2007-2008

Hybrid Car Mileage Tracking: Honda Civic

CleanMPG is a community site where you can "Learn how to raise fuel economy and lower emissions in whatever you drive". A new user (dSharp) posted this spreadsheet on the forums which tracks and charts his fuel economy. A good example for those who want to do the same.

Site: CleanMPG.com
Page/Post: Fuel Economy and Hybrid Premium
Spreadsheet: Honda Civic Hybrid Mileage Log

Beer Tasting Results

The See For Yourself blog used a spreadsheet to record beer tasting results...Looks like he's completed 13 out of 26 so far. Follow his lead by either using his ratings to pick your next beer or using his idea to create your own tasting results sheet - beer, wine, chocolate, or... breakfast cereal...

Site: See For Yourself Blog
Page/Post: Beer Tasting
Spreadsheet: Beer Libations

Rent or Buy - a calculator

David Ratajczak came up with a model to make (from his perspective) an informed decision.... He says: “At what price is renting preferable to purchasing a house? There are many factors influencing the price of a home or apartment, and the relative valuation of homes remains a matter of both art and preference. But we can still ask, for a given home at a given price, what would be the equivalent rent that I should be willing to pay for that home.” For now, he link below is published only and can't be saved with formulas, but maybe David will offer his working version online (I'll ask him).

Site: David Ratajczak's Blog
Page/Post: Rent Versus Buy
Spreadsheet: Rent vs. Buy Model

Teaching Kids Good Money Habits

The CEO of Boxxet (You Mon Tsang) has some good advice, and a spreadsheet to go along with it, to help teach kids about saving, spending and giving through managing their allowance money. The spreadsheet is a simple log of how a weekly allowance is allocated.

Site: SeedRound - Where it all starts
Page/Post: Fatherpreneurship: The Allowance
Spreadsheet: Kids Allowance Bank

No Child Left Behind Stats for DC

This is an example of publishing information in a very easy to consume form - charts first, and then the underlying data in a spreadsheet if people want it. The charts were published IN-LINE in the blog post, so they appear without the need to follow a link - they are just included in the post. The author, Nathan, sys these charts show "the percentage of students who have tested as 'proficient' in reading and math according to the No Child Left Behind annual report cards. I've broken out the data into four graphs, splitting the data by Elementary and Secondary schools and test type.". To publish charts like this, there's a special option in the chart menu (once your editing a chart) called "publish chart", which gives you a URL of the chart image.

Site: DC Education Blog
Page/Post: NCLB Stats, 2007 Edition
Spreadsheet: DC NCLB Report Card

Gamer Data: City of Heroes

If you know what City of Heroes is, or are interested in this massively multiplayer game - you'll eventually (apparently) get involved in 'base building' - This spreadsheet is described as "... a menu, not a cookbook". Credits in the spreadsheet say it was "compiled by MadScientist with help from the City Boards community. Contact MadScientist on the boards, or global chat @MadScientist. Join global channel BaseBuildersInc for all your base building questions."

Site: City Of Heroes
Page/Post: Help Finding Items
Spreadsheet: List of Base Items and Costs

Product Comparison: GPS Data Loggers

For the GPS buffs out there, GpsPasSion posted this (copyrighted) comparison of GPS Data Logger devices. Good example of using a spreadsheet to capture and compare product specifications.

Site: GPS Passion (aka GpsPasSion), and also found indirectly on DAMbook forums (DAM = Digital Asset Management)
Page/Post: GlobalSat DG-100 Data Logger
Spreadsheet: GPS Data Loggers comparison