Excel Swim Log Template?

Chris, what would really be cool is if there were a way to not only keep you absolute times over the years, but also your age-graded times a la the british site. that way, instead of seeing a long slow decline to the boneyard, with the occasional dead cat bounce thrown in during years of exceptional effort, you could have a more flat, and possibly even ascending, line pointing towards Ancient Swimmers Heaven! Well...without all the poetical metaphysical stuff...that's exactly what I do for myself, though I use the formula on the Virgina LMSC web site. Email me if you want more info (and tell me what version of Excel you use). Finals are next week, intense grading the following week, then I'll have a week or two before my research students report for the summer so I can maybe help you get something together.

Next time Mr. Fort says my hobby is veering into mental illness, I'll show him this thread. I'm such a luddite, I don't use excel or keep track of anything, workouts, times, etc. But the idea of avoiding the descending line to the boneyard is appealing.

Chris and Leslie, you two wee babes of 40-dom, one day you too will slouch towards LiveWell's superb neologisms (well, at least the masculine version): Crones/Chronuses. Speaking as Chronus who once scored 782 on the math S.A.T., but can no longer remember what a quadratic equation is (possibly an equation with four feet? No, that's not right...is it?), know that a certain Luddite quality is inevitable in us all. That's okay. Math is meant to serve the Chronus, and not vice versa! Chris, I will supply you ample time to grade your students, etc. But I bet if you came up with a cool looking freeware ap for swimmers, many would send you a stipend out of gratitude! Not a tithe, exactly, but you could put me down for $5! And math challenged Chronuses like me, hoping to maintain glory in our own minds, are legion! I bet you that when all is said and done, you could next at least $15!

Next time Mr. Fort says my hobby is veering into mental illness, I'll show him this thread. I'm such a luddite, I don't use excel or keep track of anything, workouts, times, etc. But the idea of avoiding the descending line to the boneyard is appealing. Mental illness? Well maybe, but try doing Jeff's job of Top Ten recorder for your LMSC using pencil and paper and let me know how that works out for you. (At least, that's how I ended up learning all this: as Top Ten recorder I use Excel to maintain our LMSC records and for Top Ten submissions every season.) Oh, and if anyone thinks Excel is quirky, give Team/Meet Manager a try. Ye gods...:frustrated:

Chris, what would really be cool is if there were a way to not only keep you absolute times over the years, but also your age-graded times a la the british site. that way, instead of seeing a long slow decline to the boneyard, with the occasional dead cat bounce thrown in during years of exceptional effort, you could have a more flat, and possibly even ascending, line pointing towards Ancient Swimmers Heaven! You and your darn finnish formula!! -- When I set up my spreadsheet 4 years ago, I didn't have luck getting the time format to work the way I wanted, so I did something different. It sounds like most of you are looking for a data warehouse, but I also wanted to have some analysis capabilities via excel's PivotTables. To get the PivotTables to show up the way I wanted, by ascending time, I had to create a "total time in seconds" column. I have the time entered as text, and then have a bunch of hidden columns that break out the minutes and seconds (including the decimal) based on the text entry. Last, there's a column with a formula that adds them up into total seconds (a 5:05.05 500 is a 305.05). It is a pretty round-about way to get what I wanted, but I have the text "time" column in my PivotTable and don't really look at the total seconds column.

Mental illness? Well maybe, but try doing Jeff's job of Top Ten recorder for your LMSC using pencil and paper and let me know how that works out for you. (At least, that's how I ended up learning all this: as Top Ten recorder I use Excel to maintain our LMSC records and for Top Ten submissions every season.) Oh, and if anyone thinks Excel is quirky, give Team/Meet Manager a try. Ye gods...:frustrated: Jeff's job as Top Ten recorder and registrar is almost like having another full time job. Eek. :bolt: I actually don't think we have Potomac Valley LMSC records, although that would be unusual. I've never even seen them. I think Jeff must be refusing to keep them. lol I'm not opposed to keeping track of my times if there was some easy way to do it. Although I'm quite fine with the fact that I can't remember any of my 50 evilstroke times. Jim: Shame on you, wasting that math SAT and lapsing into early math alzheimers. My verbal score was higher and I am math hater. I don't think I can do middle school math anymore ... All right, I just read Peg's post. You're all a serious bunch of geeks and nerds. :thhbbb:

Try www.winningstats.com -- they have a swimming log program (including times) that's free.

Attached is a simple excel spreadsheet I use to track times & splits. The first line is a sample data; the yellow highlights is entered while the green is calculated. Enter the date/stroke/distance and subtractive splits, and the cumulative split and final time is calculated. The final time is max from the cummulative splits, to save a little bit of typing. If you don't have splits, you can just enter the final time over the formula. The time boxes use the custom format m:ss.00. Times must be entered x:xx.xx so excel will recognize them as times. This is super-sweet. The only thing left is to add the yards/meters conversion formula, which even I can do! Much thanks.

For the most super-easy way to enter your times in excel, just type the hatch mark (') before you type in the time. That signifies to excel that the box is a text-format box and whatever you type will show up exactly as you type it. Of course, since your time is now 'seen' by excel as text rather than numbers, it's not much use if you want to do anything with the data (plot or whatnot). Muppet, I used to do my spreadsheets exactly like yours... lots of multiplying, subtracting, then putting it all back to together in multiple hidden columns. I refer to it as the 'brute force method'. I kinda like brute force and still use it to doublecheck when I come up with a slightly more elegant solution, but seriously, if you ever have to totally revamp your sheets try Chris Stevenson's method. It saves a lot of time and misery (and typing)! I never thought of tracking my season bests over multiple seasons. Hmmm... that sounds pretty cool! Most of my excel effort goes into my training log which tracks yardage and workout time for swimming, weights, and PT exercises. I started tracking my workouts this way when I did tri's because I could not keep the three sports balanced without a pictoral representation. Now that I no longer do tri's, I converted the biking and running section to weights and PT. The dates are conditional formatted for intensity level and everything rolls up to month snapshots and a rolling season total. It's very helpful in tracking training habits (and taper!!!) from season to season.

Beluga, this is just what I was looking for. Thanks so much