Budget Planning with Excel: Freezing Panes

Here's Tip Number 1: Learn how to freeze panes properly. This is a feature of Excel that never works the way I think it should, but it is possible to freeze the leftmost column(s) and topmost row(s) so that they're always visible when you scroll elsewhere in the document.

In Excel 2007, the Freeze Panes command is on the View tab. Pre-2007, it's under Window.

The trick is to select the cell that will be in the upper left-hand corner of the lower right-hand quadrant before choosing "Freeze Panes." Got that?

If you select the cell highlighted as "This one!" in the picture above, you'll freeze the top two rows and the leftmost column so they're always visible.

At the risk of belaboring the point, it may help to think of this command as cutting the sheet into four quadrants (the "panes"). Excel will make a cut along the top of the selected cell and along its left side.

If you mess up, there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust where the "cuts" lie. You just have to unfreeze the panes and try again.

(HT: Tech Xpress)

Budget Planning with Excel

I spent New Year's Day gearing up to track the family finances. Since the beginning of our marriage, Mrs. Chaka and I have used an Excel spreadsheet for this purpose. I was planning to migrate to something more fully featured, such as GNUCash, but after playing around with that program for a bit, I felt that a couple modifications to Excel would serve us better. This is because I'm lazy and didn't want to learn a new system.

Now, credit where credit is due: Mrs. Chaka started our budget, using a system she learned from her mentor Jason Falck. Any blunders I've introduced should be laid at my door, of course, not theirs.

You may have heard of Dave Ramsey's envelope system: You put the budgeted cash in an envelope and when the money for that category is gone, it's gone. Our system is like that, except we use Excel columns instead of envelopes. There's a Gas column, a Groceries column, a Rent column, etc. When we make a payment from our credit card or bank account, we deduct the money from two columns--the account and the budget category. E.g.,


On the 5th of January there, the $24.86 we spent at Valli Produce (The Platonic Ideal of a Grocery Store) was deducted from our credit card (USAA) and from the Groceries column.

One of the reasons Mrs. Chaka and I both dreaded working on the budget in the past was the time it took to enter every expenditure twice--sometimes more than twice, since we often needed to use comments to make notes about the transaction.

My goal on New Year's Day was to hack Excel to reduce the number of times I have to enter the same information. In the next few posts, I'll share my results.

My Goodbye Song for 2009

Sing us out, Bob.

Ommwriter

Ommwriter claims to recapture for you the ability to write without distractions. Yet it's not featureless: it has variable fonts, sizes, backgrounds, even different sound effects for your typing.

I think I know what Alan Jacobs would say: Those are the distractions. And Neal Stephenson would wonder, will your words still be there in five years?

Long quote from Stephenson's book, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, available for free here:

I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.

Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.

Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to exist.

Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.

It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.

The Peanut Butter Video from Sesame Street

Anytime I'm cooking, and the recipe calls for both salt and sugar, this song gets in my head. Every single time, people. This is what Sesame Street does to you.

Update on No Problem

I was talking to technical support the other day. After I explained the device's malfunction, the gracious and polite technician's first words were "No problem." And it grated. I had a flash of irritation. If it wasn't a problem, I wouldn't be talking to you. Then I realized that our conversation had simply skipped a groove.

We were following a script, the technician and I. My script didn't have the line, "Can you help me solve this malfunction?" but it might as well have. That is why people call technical support, after all--to request help. It's such an integral proposition of the call that it didn't occur to me to verbalize it.

Of course, if I had happened to verbalize the request, the exchange would have made perfect sense. In the technician's "[It is] No problem," the referent of the "it" was my (implied) request, not the malfunction. If the conversation did skip a groove, it was probably my fault for missing my line of the politeness script.

Die Prinzen!

I listened to two bands today that illustrate my utter lack of taste in music. I think you should go listen to both of these bands. I think that they will put a bounce in your step and a smile on your face.

But I know you'll probably hate them.

Die Prinzen (HT: Paige Skakal) and Brave Combo (HT: Carol Stream Public Library)

Just type them into Grooveshark (one at a time, for best results) and hit play all.

Feel free to tell me what you think.

Incidentally, Brave Combo came to mind today because I heard Bob Dylan's "Must Be Santa" and thought, That sounds like it could be a Brave Combo performance. Well, according to Brave Combo's website, it's a cover of their arrangement.

I found this article from MSNBC to be interesting.
Authors of a new online project that aims to create a Bible suitable for conservatives argue that contemporary scholars have inserted liberal views into the Bible.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34270487/ns/us_news-faith//from/ET

I Had No Idea I Was So Annoying

Apparently the general public despises my default casual reply to "Thanks." I'm sure that I say "No problem" all the time. I never meant anything by it--it's just one of those pieces of the politeness script that one has to deploy in the conversation ritual.

But it turns out that what people hear when I say "No problem" is "a problem caused by you will be graciously ignored." That's according to the readers of Stanley Fish's blog at nytimes.com. Check it out for a list of niceties that they don't find so nice.

I can't agree with most of the list. I do find the corporation-speak offensive: "Your call is important to us"; "For your convenience"; "In order to serve you better." These are expressions that no normal human being would come up with--they spring from spin sessions. They are nakedly disingenuous, each one a malevolent "This is not a pipe."

But most of the things people complain about on Fish's blog aren't in this class. "Is everything all right?"; "Take care"; "Have a nice day." People seriously have a problem with these?

John M. Ellis wants you to know that the Brothers Grimm are frauds

In One Fairy Story too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales, Ellis documents the evidence for Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's deceptions and takes folklore scholars to task for stubbornly ignoring this evidence. The Grimms come off looking like a pair of undergraduates faking their research paper; Grimm scholars wind up looking like willfully blind burghers who can't bring themselves to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

Incidentally, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is not one of the stories collected in Grimms' Fairy Tales (auf Deutsch, Kinder- und Hausmarchen); that fairy tale was composed by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen and the Grimms are traditionally juxtaposed: Andersen was an artist, writing his own fairy tales; the Grimms were scientists, merely collecting and reporting the indigenous tales of Germany. Ellis's book shows that

(1) The Grimms claimed to be just that, scientific collectors and preservers of indigenous German tales;

BUT

(2) Their sources were almost entirely drawn from their immediate social sphere: young, local, middle-class, educated, and in many cases, French-speaking;
(3) Far from preserving the wording and content of their sources, the Grimms constantly reworked the material;
(4) This reworking involved substantive changes, including taking out sexually suggestive elements, making the "good guys" better and the "bad guys" worse, and generally making the stories less wild and more rational.

I found Ellis convincing, and I'm surprised that I've never heard his polemic, even though the book was published in 1983. The most disappointing part for me is losing the image of the Grimms as ethnographers: tramping through the German countryside, listening to toothless old women and furiously scribbling down notes. They cultivated that image by, for example, listing the source of one story as "the River Main region" and another as "Cassel"--when in fact, both stories had come from members of the same family (the Hassenpflugs), who had lived in both places but were originally of French Hugenot extraction. This is what we call "fudging the data."

Sigh. I guess the movie got it half right--unfortunately, it was the con artist half, not the traveling-across-Germany half.

Stuff Christians Like: Samaritan's Purse

Mrs. Chaka and I just contributed to Samaritan's Purse at the urging of Stuff Christians Like. After raising $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam in one day, they're now raising funds for two more.

I'm not much for giving to a cause just because a celebrity says I should, but I figured it's the least we could do for a blog that has the funniest (and most edifying) comments on the entire internet.

Linus has probably blown his entire paycheck on this.

I love how for xkcd, Ender's Game is a shared text

Learn to Stay Away from Those Who Carry 'Round a Fire Hose

You could call me a Bob Dylan fan; my music collection has more albums by him than by any other artist. I acknowledge that he's an acquired taste, though. The first time I heard him on the radio ("Like a Rolling Stone" on 98.7 FM KISD), I thought it was a joke. What was this doing on Oldies radio? Organ music and a guy who can't sing? When it went on and on for minute after minute, I thought it was a joke on an immense scale. Then the song ended, and the next song began, without a single word from the DJ to explain what had just happened. Apparently, everyone else was in on the joke.

I think I heard other Dylan songs eventually--"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" at least--but it wasn't until I found out that he was a Minnesotan and had spent time around the University of Minnesota that I picked up one of his albums (Bob Dylan). I knew he was supposed to be cool, so I listened to it over and over again until I liked it. Honestly, that's pretty much what I did. When I found another album in the used bin at Cheapo, I'd buy it and repeat the process.

"Like a Rolling Stone" has grown on me somewhat, but it's still not my favorite. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" probably tops my list. I like the personal connection to "Positively Fourth Street" (I lived for three years in Dinkytown, on the titular Fourth Street). I drive Mrs. Chaka crazy by playing "You Ain't Going Nowhere" over and over again on our cheap acoustic guitar.

I say all that to say this: like Andrew Ferguson (HT: JT), I have no idea why people continue to revere Dylan and buy his albums, when he is in no way the artist he used to be. He never really sang the notes, but his inimitable style did have some charm and emotional resonance. Now his voice is shot so badly that he has only two notes, and only one emotional register: deep mortal anguish.

If Ferguson is right about what's going on inside Dylan's head, then maybe I wasn't so wrong when I heard his music for the first time. Maybe it is a joke on a massive scale.