Spreadsheets are a wonderful thing.

They have functions and formulas and fonts.  They offer symmetry and order – all of the things that matter to accountants. When we’re feeling creative, we can apply conditional formatting to any spreadsheet cells that deserve a little extra color. We can auto-filter our way through a massive list of details to find only the pertinent information. We can sort a list of values so  the largest dollar amounts are at the top. We can combine strings of text to make other strings and we can turn data into tables.

We can autosum to create a total that we then underline in just the correct way (single line above, double line below). We can add comments and images.  We can modify the precision of any number that we display (to add or remove decimals) and we can add a “$” whenever one is needed.

And best of all, if we make a mistake while living in our spreadsheet world, we can use the undo button.

So how might we use our new Microsoft Excel-lent Brain? Imagine being able to auto-filter all of the information you receive in the course of a day. You could just click a triangle in your brain to pull out only the positive feedback and filter out the negative. You could color code all of the really important images that pass your visual cortex so you could always locate your car keys. You could sort out the most important tasks from the meaningless ones, and keep track of your food by caloric impact. Every time you spend money, you would see the total of your expenditures in a single column with properly applied commas and decimal places.

If you say the wrong thing, you would just apply the undo button or choose not to save the file. And then there’s the autorecover feature…

To learn more about some of these Excel features and others that would be useful brain features, join us for a free “Eat and excel*” gathering on May 13th.

*The cool name for our gathering, “eat and excel” was provided by Debi Cali at Baldacci Vineyards. I am pretty sure there were creativity-enhancing spirits involved in the creation of the title.