Gun spreadsheet?

[Skans]

I keep my gun inventory in Word. It's simply easier and allows me to add comments on why I purchased certain guns easier than Excel.

 

[Bill DeShivs]

I have an inventory.
Just thought using a spreadsheet might be fun- "How many .22s do I have? How many guns are engraved?" That sort of thing.
I'm beginning to think that the spreadsheets are way too complicated to use unless you really NEED to be able to categorize-which I don't.

I do thank Aguila Blanca for spending so much time assisting/educating me on the subject.

 

[OneFreeTexan]

MyArmsCache allows her to put in pictures, prices, what I paid, when I bought it, what it’s worth now, location of where I keep it,,,,caliber, finishe, capacity, and much more,
and it has the ability to give me a total of the value of my guns, how many I won, what I paid, etc. (ooops, can’t show that to the wife).

It is a very good program... and I looked at seven others and tried them before deciding.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

MyArmsCache allows her to put in pictures, prices, what I paid, when I bought it, what it’s worth now, ...

FWIW, it appears that MyArmsCache is an app that's only available for the iPhone. Their web site doesn't make any mention of a version for Android, or of an actual program for a real computer.

 

[dshack]

I keep my gun inventory in Word format and have hard copies printed and stored with my other important documents...with instructions to my sons not to let their mother sell my guns for what I told her I paid for them!

 

[OneFreeTexan]

Perhaps myArmsCache is only for iPad’s and iPhones. Works great on my ipad,,,which I use daily,,,,I find an ipad much better, more versatile than a ‘real’ computer and I own both.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

Just thought using a spreadsheet might be fun- "How many .22s do I have? How many guns are engraved?" That sort of thing.
I'm beginning to think that the spreadsheets are way too complicated to use unless you really NEED to be able to categorize-which I don't.

If you want to get into that, a spreadsheet can do a lot -- but it takes work to set it up.

The simple, brute force way is to put, for example, caliber (i.e. chambering) in its own column. If you sort on that column, the spreadsheet will group all the .22s together, all the .380s together, all the .308s together ... and then you can easily count how many in each cluster.

But you can also use the formulas the create expressions to do all that for you. Once you have it set up, the formula is there forever, so it's easy to use at any time in the future. But, it takes a bit of work to set up the formulas. For those whose lives revolve around spreadsheets it's probably easy. For the rest of us, it requires a lot of homework to do something like that.

As an example: Aside from inventory apps and templates, I've also looked at/for reloading apps and templates. There was one I found on some forum -- might even have been here, I don't remember. The author entered a very long string of addition functions and then some other stuff to calculate standard deviation. What he did was to basically use the spreadsheet to do what he would have to do on paper. That works, of course, but ...

One of the comments was "Your formula is correct, but wouldn't it have been easier to just use the STDEV function?" And it would ... but you have to know that function is there. Back in the days of MS-DOS I used Quattro Pro as my spreadsheet. In those days, software came with printed manuals. The manual for Quattro Pro was probably an inch and a half thick, and it was 90 percent just listing the various functions and explaining how they work. Today you have to buy a copy of "Excel for Dummies" to get anything close to that.

 

[Bill DeShivs]

Do they print "Excel for Lazy Imbeciles?"

 

[Hal]

Do they print "Excel for Lazy Imbeciles?"

The "Dummy" books are ok -& - there are all kinds of online sources to learn Excel - both paid and free.