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I decided when purchasing my new car I'd keep an excel spreadsheet log of all my maintenance and running costs of my car in order to prove to myself it was a good decision. However it's not a very good spreadsheet.

How do you guys keep logs? Do you have a fancy spreadsheet with macros to do every little thing you could think of? Or just a pencil and book in your car?

I would like to have a nicely formatted spreadsheet that produced graphs to help me visualize a few things better. And I've messed with it a bit, but thought it might be good to ask for ideas or perhaps even receive examples from others.

The most important thing (to me) that mine does is produce the cost per km.

Edit: Alternatively, are there any websites to do this sorta thing, I've seen a few but they're poorly made.

Goto Microsoft's website, and under the Downloads section search for Office templates. Just type log sheet in the search box and it should provide a bunch of pre-produced spreadsheets for you to just fill in.

That's normally what I do.

I did a check through their templates, but they all appear more business oriented. More so you can log your expenses and submit them to a company or for tax purposes.

I'm looking for something to help me record and project the cost of running my vehicle.

I can draft you something if you want, but it's (fairly) simple.

Create colums for different classes of expenses (fuel, oil, other lubricants, service labour, tires, parts, mods, etc) and then in the rows record each occurence with a datestamp.

Have some more fields off to the side (or better yet, on a different worksheet of the spreadsheet) that calculates totals. You can even add new summary areas as needed (i.e. having a running total to date is good, but after seeing which rows fall within a calendar year, you could have a new cell with a new formula that totals b5-b45, that range theoretically representing a calendar year).

For some extra savvy fun, host a MySQL or MS SQL Express database instance on your home network, and then use a MS Access or OOBase front-end to enter data into the DB. Create a custom report to generate the historical info you require. I thin you can use OOCalc or Excel to manage data entry as well with an ODBC connection - the same one you'll need for Base/Access anyways.

Now that you have me thinking, I may just whip up someting like this for the truck tonight. I'll keep you informed.

i just have date, item(gas, oil, maintenance item), L/km's, total cost. i also have one more bc i get money back for driving, but i guess you dont need that one.

Its just a simple form, you just need to keep track of things thats all. the L/kms helps me to see if there is something wrong with gas milleage or emissions that i should look at. Sometimes i can find out when the tires are low too bc gas mileage goes up. the whole point for you to do is to keep track of all the money you spend. After a while it goes into a routine and you will see how your car performs.

Here's an example of what I keep track of. It's just a portion of mine extracted onto a seperate worksheet. It's actually the cost of my East Coast trip this past September. The main worksheet includes maintence items on the same list, as well as insurance costs and any modification I've done to the car. The comments section contains what maintenance was done or what modifications, as well as anything noticed. But I didn't really want to publish that information, so just the East Coast portion here.

You may notice I averaged exactly what my car should average highway driving 8.86 L/100 km (~26 mpg). Though I did manage a tank at 7.78 L/100 km (30 mpg). You can also see where I pushed a bit more to make time where my mileage dropped to 9.68 L/100 km (24 mpg). The 13.02 is a carry over from before the trip. In which case I may be misrepresenting where the mileage should display?

I'd just heard of some people doing cooler things than what I've done. NOS2Go4Me sounds like he has an interesting idea with the MySQL and such, if I were better at PHP or Ruby for example, I might consider making a web application to do this for myself and friends. But I'm terrible, perhaps I can convince my programming friends to give it a whirl.

Anyhoo, this is what mine looks like.



Edit: Perhaps I should have concidered also including the gas station filled up at. Oh well.

Yeah, I did an OpenOffice spreadsheet similar to that, actually. I wasn't horribly impressed with it. It did have extra columns for consumables and service intervals, however.

I'll work on the DB-end of things tonight. Sorry man, I'm fighting a brokenish wisdom tooth (today's going good so far) that started up on the weekend.

NOS2Go4Me,Feb 25 2009, 08:12 AM Wrote:Yeah, I did an OpenOffice spreadsheet similar to that, actually. I wasn't horribly impressed with it. It did have extra columns for consumables and service intervals, however.

I'll work on the DB-end of things tonight. Sorry man, I'm fighting a brokenish wisdom tooth (today's going good so far) that started up on the weekend.
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Oh hey, don't apologize! Take all the time you need, up to, and beyond infinity if required.

... Brokenish? ... that sounds terrible! I want to say "get better" but usually things like that don't get better on their own? Go to the dentist!

Curious, could you tell that was OpenOffice from the screenshot? or is that just what you use as well?

It's my last bad tooth (literally) and I'm scheduled to get it pulled Monday. It's broken pretty good but I've had bad teeth all my life (all except 1 fixed now, or removed, etc) so on a pain scale of 1-10, this is only a 4 overall.

The pain has already receded dramatically since Saturday night, thankfully. Only on one 400mg ibuprofen a day right now.

Now a real pain? Apparently this asshole of a dental surgeon won't bill direct for my insurance-covered costs while my usual dentist doesn't have a problem doing just that (but due to the nature of the tooth, he doesn't want to touch it and I don't blame him). Really don't wanna get started about that tonight. :angry:

Oh hell, don't talk to me about health benefits @ work right now...

I'm ready to commit mass murder against my co-workers (with my fellow union members first up against the wall)

Word to the wise NEVER end up the square peg in a round hole health wise, you'll get screwed harder than a hooker otherwise AND they'll try to make you look like an a-hole for trying to stand up for yourself ta boot <_<

NefCanuck