koyotekathy and spreadsheets

[Zoe's Life]

Originally Posted by koyotekathy

Your test results are yours and you can demand and get them. We always do. If you were at the recent meet in Las Vegas, you would have met several of us who are keeping critical test results on spread sheets. Kirby Stone gets the award from me as having the best and helping me improve mine.

Can you share with us how you improved them? I use Excel. I want to find a way to permantly mark on each chart the high/low normals. Any ideas? Any other tricks you can share?

Zoe

[koyotekathy]

The real pro is Kirby Stone who is also a subscriber.
My original spreadsheet had the following columns:
A = dates
B = WBC
C = RBC

etc. with a heading on each column identifying it and the normal ranges.

Kirby showed me to add a column inbetween each of the above columns, filled in with the high or low value, whichever one is important in each case. When you highlight the entire spreadsheet to make a chart, those added columns are the norms that will show up as a straight line across the chart, in some neat bright color.
Later if you want to print out the chart without showing the norm columns, use "hide" on those columns.

Usually you're more interested in a high or a low, so it's usually unnecessary to put both in.

Also, when in putting the values in the charts, I change the font to bold and the color red when a value is not within the normal range.

Also, it just doesn't work to put all the various values in because some values you're looking at are very limited, such as WBC, RBC. If you put them on the same chart as platelets, nothing shows up very well.

I also use a trendline.

Before Kirby, I couldn't figure out how to get the dates running along the bottom of the chart. That was because I didn't highlight the dates. I'm not in Excel right now, but there's a code in the formating of the chart that will display those dates. Just remember to change the alinement to perpendicular if you have a lot of dates so you can read them.

That's all I can think of right now. Hope this helps!

[Zoe's Life]

Oh, I am psyched! Thanks! I have been using different colors for putting in the values, but I love the extra column idea. It is perfect. I look at each column seperately so I don't have the problem of the numbers which jump around more drawfing the other numbers. I have all my CBC numbers on one page and the differentials on another. But you can highlight specific columns so even if the platelets and hgb are on the same page, it doesn't mean I have to view them together in a chart.

I haven't figured out the date thing either. I always get generic dates, not the ones I have entered on the spread sheet.

Thanks for your help.

Zoe

[koyotekathy]

Dates were done of the hardest things of all. Go into Chart Options; Format Axis;

For category X - Patterns = check automatic; category Y - Check that one.

For Scale - show your starting dates.

Also on data labels, I check to show values.

If you play with this a little while, all of a sudden your dates will pop up on the botton of your spreadsheet just as you hoped they would. I use a smaller font size as I have so many dates for Paul.

It doesn't work as well when you simply click on the X axes to format it. Works best gong through chart options.

Have fun!

Kathy