Spreadsheets
cheyman
Posts: 157
Ok, I have read too many post that refer to "your spreadsheets". Now, I am a data dude and I am intrigued by some of the comments I have read about spreadsheets. I would like to know what people are tracking on their personal sheets? So...what is the metadata you are tracking?
-Chey
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Inside of all three spreadsheets are the following columns. Inven#, Name, wrapper, binder, filler, Date Acuired and Acquired from. The smoked tab has a column for a simple rating, i.e. Dog Rocket, OK but don't buy again, Very Good, Go buy a box NOW. The passed tab has a field for who I passed it to.
The Inven# is written with a sharpie on the cello or onto a piece of masking tape on the band.
In the works are fields for the blender, country of origin and working on seperating the Name field into 3 fields consisting of Make, Model and Vitola. Now that I'm thinking of it I should probably add date smoked and date passed fields.
I have a large Excel workbook with many tabs. I don't think I'll describe all the tabs, but I'll get to the most important ones. My current inventory is on an aptly-named tab within the workbook. The columns, left to right, are:
The cigars are organized within the sheet in order of days rest in the smoking queue (most days rest are at the top). Cigars that have not yet been moved to the smoking queue are organized as I see fit below (usually the next up for the smoking queue will be at the top. Stuff I'm saving to age or for a special occassion near the bottom).
When I am going out for a smoke, rather than open my humi and rummage around, I simply look at the spreadsheet, and it will tell me the size, body, wrapper, and amount of rest of all the cigars in the smoking queue. This is where it starts behaving not entirely like a queue. From the listed cigars, I will highlight the rows that have had at least 14 days of rest in the smoking queue, and choose my cigar based on the desired body and smoke time, as well as my particular interest in flavor profile. I weight my selection heavily in favor of cigars that have had a lot of rest or age. I'm not interested in my cigars getting too much age on them, unless I've set them aside for that purpose.
OK.. We're through one tab on the spreadsheet. This may take a while.
2. There is a spreadsheet for everything in Joe's life. That is not an esxaggeration. Money, camping gear he wants, cigars he has smoked, things he wants for the next 12 Christmases.....
I don't do any tagging of the individual cigars. My low inventory, small number of dupes, and **** retentive organization methods prevent the need for this. If you select any cigar from my spreadsheet, I can tell you exactly where it is.
Some of these methods are intentionally primitive, and would need to be tweaked for an inventory like Urbino's. Everything is customized to meet my needs. As far as the number of tabs, let me check....there are currently 15 tabs in the spreadsheet, but this fluctuates up and down over time. Some tabs are used to assemble future orders, or to track things like A Pass Deux (in the Trades forum), etc. I'm not sure how many of those tabs I'll endeavor to describe here, but I'll definitely get the ones that are of most interest. Next up will be the "Brands" tab.
The first 8 columns of this tab are identical to the first 8 columns of the "Inventory" tab (that was the appropriate name I had alluded to earlier). Specifically, these columns are Brand, Origin, Wrapper, Body, Size, Len, Ring, and Price.
After this, I have a column labeled "Try" which I use to mark the cigars which I am interested in sampling, but have not had. I will mark a specific vitola for a particular brand. When I mark a cigar in this column, it highlights the row green.
The next column is labeled "Re-Try" and I use this to mark a vitola I would like to try next, in a brand that I have already had. Usually, I will make this determination based on my previous experiences with that brand. For example, I tried the 5 Vegas Gold Torpedo and loved it. Then I tried the Churchill, and loved it a little less. So I thought that I would enjoy the blend more at a larger ring gauge. Thus, my introduction to the Double Nickel. Rows that have been marked in this column are automatically highlighted in a light blue.
The next column has a label which is being withheld. I have used this column to mark all of the cigars that come in a sampler-of-interest, available at another on-line retailer. This column is temporary, and will be removed once I make that purchase, probably sometime in the summer.
The next two columns are labeled "Qty" and "Total." These are working columns in which I plan an order of assorted singles. I mark the quantity I wish to purchase, and the "Total" column is updated accordingly based on the price. If I select the whole column, I can see the computed total of my order (before shipping).
The next column is labeled "Comments" and I use this to hold random other information about the cigar (like ratings fom the snooty rags, if they caught my attention.. also, I use it to record the name of a sampler in which this cigar is available, so that I can filter by the contents of that sampler and use it to make a purchasing decision.
The next two columns are "Had" and "Rating." The "Had" column records how many of a particular cigar I have smoked (since I started recording). The "Rating" column records the afterage rating (I use a 1-5 system that will be described later) for that cigar. These averages are computed manually by filtering and selection on my Ratings tab (to be discussed later). Any cigar which has received a rating of 4 or more is automatically highlighted in royal blue.
The last column is labeled "MAW Cand"... In the event that I ever have something that somebody wants in the Make a Wish thread, I will need to make myself a selection. Here, I have marked the cigars that would be good candidates (they aren't too pricey, they aren't readily available at the B&M, and they aren't components of any samplers under consideration).
Each vitola (of interest to me) of each brand (of interest to me) gets its own row in the spreadsheet. For example, there are 5 rows for the Onyx Reserve (Toro, Churchill, Robusto, Torbusto, and Mini Belicoso). When researching a brand, I will choose the sizes/shapes which most appeal to me, and record the information on those. It would be (even more) exhausting to try to list all available vitolas. However, the list I have is pretty exhaustive as it is. There are currently 675 rows on this tab, representing 179 brands.
When I acquire a cigar, I copy its vital information from the "Brands" tab to the "Inventory" tab. I supply the additional information as required on that tab. If the cigar happens to be a brand that I have not yet recorded in the spreadsheet, I look up its vital information, on all vitolas of interest, and record it in the "Brands" tab before copying the information over to the "Inventory" tab.
It is worth noting here that, while I use colors for various reasons to highlight items of interest or to imply a certain value, I always have that specific attribute recorded in a cell. The reason for this is that you can't filter and sort based on highlight colors, but you can filter and sort on values in cells. I use sorting and filtering very liberally as I work in the spreadsheet. It is the only way to navigate this volume of information.
Ha! Joe that reminds me of the catamaran captain in the Caymans that said he had never lost a passenger , and to be sure our name was on the guest list so he could mark it off if we were lost overboard during the trip....
The columns on this tab are as follows:
Regarding the Overall rating, I use a 1-5 system as follows:
5 - I will smoke this any chance I get at any price
4 - Great smoke
3 - I would enjoy it again, but not crave it
2 - I would smoke this given limited options
1 - I won't smoke this again
When I smoke a cigar, its attributes get moved from the "Inventory" tab to the "Ratings" tab, and I supply the additional information. This almost always goes in immediately following the experience, sometimes on the next day. I determine values for the attributes as I smoke the cigar. Yes, I always time the length of the smoke, rounded to the nearest 5 minutes. At this point, you should not find this bit of information at all surprising.
The day after a smoke, I review my spreadsheet for a good candidate to promote to the smoking queue humidor. I try to retain a good balance of mild- to full-bodied smokes in the queue, of all different sizes and wrappers. The spreadsheet is really handy at this point, because rather than rummaging through my tupperdors, I simply look over the spreadsheet at my stock, and choose a cigar from that list.
Once I know what cigar is going into the smoking queue, I fetch it from the tupperdor and put it into the smoking queue humi. There is a specific organization to my humi, such that the newest cigar will always go into a certain location, and half the sticks will be subsequently rotated through, following a pattern I will not divulge. The 4 cigars which have been in my humidor the longest also sit "naked." So whichever cigar was previously 5th-oldest is now 4th-oldest. I remove its cellophane (if it had it). I also rotate the cigars themselves through this process (such that they are either facing up or down, depending how far they've progressed through the queue). I will, about once every couple months, flip all the cigars so that their heads are where their feet were (and vice versa). I will also check the hygrometer any time the humidor is opened. If I need to re-charge beads, I will get everything set up for this process before retrieving the beads. It should go without saying that the humidor remains closed while I re-charge the beads.
Without the spreadsheet, my humidor would be open for a much longer period of time. As it is, my humidor is open very little, and only long enough to reach in and grab the cigar I need. The rotation process isn't nearly as elaborate as you would imagine, because it's a very (VERY) small humidor. I would love to have the humi open longer so I could stare at and smell the cigars, but I have finally reached a point where this temptation isn't so massive. I have been known to open the humidor and take a big whiff. My next humidor will have a glass top, which will at least relieve the urge to stare at the cigars.
There used to be a thread on here called "Pick Joe's Smoke" ... I used this to tell everybody about what I had smoked, such that people could make recommendations about other things I might like. My posts in this thread are taken nearly verbatim from the spreadsheet. I still write in the same manner, but I have elected to quit boring everybody with that thread. I'll occassionally post up in the "whatcha smokin' tonight" thread, but these days that is only when I'm smoking something I've received from somebody else, or the experience was otherwise noteworthy, or I'm just bored.
Every cigar on the "Ratings" tab has a corresponding "Long Journal" entry. Sometimes, these entries are composed as much as 2 days past the actual smoke date. Usually, they are done the next morning when I'm supposed to be working (like I'm supposed to be right now.. hehe)
Bump…worth revisiting???
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
Nope.
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.