Spreadsheets.
I am very passionate about spreadsheets. I primarily work in Google sheets, as I am most familiar with them in my time as a Google admin at the University. Here are some examples of spreadsheets I have created.
Vacation Planner.
The crown jewel on my list of spreadsheets is the trip / vacation planner I designed to help coordinate a trip with my friend. She is very particular about what she likes to do, so I designed a sheet with a single interface that allowed her to:
Choose a location and get a description of that place
Select activities she was interested in doing from a populated list determined by location
Choose keywords of the hotel that she wanted to stay and and select from the populated list or view the hotel website
Determine if she wanted to fly or drive, revealing the cost and travel time differences
Choose the option for a rental car in any given location
Enter a number of nights
View a breakdown of the costs of all of the above as well as food cost averages and a total that included an emergency fund buffer, which was then split into our respective savings needed
Gift Exchange.
This is my most complex spreadsheet to date. I run an unofficial gift exchange for the fans of the McElroy Brothers, a group of podcasters. Each year, hundreds of people sign up. My sheet records their information from forms, ingests the data, and places it in a centralized sheet. Pairing is semi-automated by country of origin, shipping preferences, and exclusion requests. The assignment emails, communication between participants, and matching of late sign ups is fully automated. This includes the system being able to reference a wealth of information from a single message that is sent between the admin email and the gifters. It has three different emails it is capable of sending that are adapted to the subject matter. There are a serious of double-checks in place to ensure proper supervision and management of assignments and can run without interference for weeks at a time.
Knowledge Automation.
This compendium of documentation uses database-style calls to monitor updates and changes needed for knowledge articles. It automatically dispatches an email when it is time for an article to be reviewed, and allows users to query for articles they need to find, determine its location, and update the details as necessary.
Fantasy Marketplace Gambling.
A third example of a spreadsheet I have created is the fantasy market generator I created for my D&D campaigns. It allows players to gamble on whether they will get a good, bad, or mixed use item that they can choose to buy. It generates prices, DC checks, and item selection by interpreted rolls added to set ranges and returning a value, meaning that the experience is unique every time it is used. As this is the only spreadsheet listed that does not contain private data, if you are interested in reviewing it, please reach out.