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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3119 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I backpack as a hobby. My packing list is a spreadsheet broken down into sections such as "worn clothing", "packed clothing", "shelter system", etc. Each line gets a function (shelter), a description (tent, tarp, bivy sack, etc), and a quantity (1x tent, 2x pairs of socks, etc). I think it would be neat to let the spreadsheet estimate a pack weight as well so I added another column for weight calculations. It also a little pie chart so I can see what sections of my pack are adding the most weight (food, clothing, whatever).

I have a second spreadsheet with the weights of various items I use but it's a little tedious to copy/paste the weight every time I want to generate a new packing list, especially since I like to swap out different pieces of kit to dial my pack in for various environments and seasons. I'm not much of a programmer so I'm wondering what the easiest way around this is. My first thought was to figure out how to create a drop-down menu for each cell with the item choices pre-loaded and have the spreadsheet call the appropriate weight. For example, for my "shelter" cell, I would create a drop-down that had my winter tent, my hammock, my bivy, etc and then the "weight" cell would auto-populated based on my selection. This seems like an inelegant solution that's going to require a lot of upkeep so I'm wondering if a simple data-base in something like OpenOffice Base or MS Access might be be more appropriate. From my amateur viewpoint it seems like the database might be more work upfront but would be less maintenance in terms of upkeep every time I add/remove a piece of kit from my stockpile. (I'm a bit of a gear-do, I'll admit). Or is it six of one, half-dozen of the other?

I think LighterPack has most of the functionality you mentioned. I'm not sure how stable it is, since it's been in beta for at least several years.

It used to be very popular for sharing load-outs in the ultra light and thru-hiking communities.Looks like the community around it is possibly not as active as a couple of years ago.

You can try it without registering, and it's open source if you really want to roll your own solution. Disclaimer, I have no affiliation with the people who run the site, and for all I know they could be stealing all your data. I've never gotten any spam from them though.

The other commenters have the right of it.

Excel/google have VLOOKUP(). You give it a sorted list and a value to compare. Then it tells you what was next to that in the table. So if you have a column for gear names and a column for weights, then you can look up weights by name.

I’ll break down an example based on @bleep. Say you have a single sheet with your packing list (column A), gear names (C), and gear weights (D).

To fill column B with packed weights, instead of putting in values, use something like

=VLOOKUP(A2, C$2:D$50, 2, false)

In space B2. Then it will look for something matching A2 in the cells from C2 to C50. It’ll take the 2nd value from whatever row it matched, and since we told it C2:D50, that means it’ll give a value from column D. Copy it to the rest of B. You can then sum and pie chart column B just as you do now.

Bleep’s example lets you move the gear info to different sheets and split up the list. That’s a matter of preference.

I think you could easily accomplish this with most spreadsheet programs with little upkeep. Have your data sheet with the list of all your items, have your "packing" sheet with drop downs, and then have a sum cell with a formula which sums added vlookups. The vlookups will use the drop down cell to find the weight in the data sheet and then add all the weights together, e.g., "=(vlookup(A1, Shelter!A1:D14, 4, false))+(vlookup(A1, Clothing!A10:D20, 4, false))" and repeat for however many categories with A being the item list and D being the weight. For quantities you could add another column with that number in between the dropdown boxes and then include that in sum formula cell.

The dropdown cells can autopopulate choices from your datasheet if you designate the list range. If you do it this way, the only "upkeep" would be to fill out the item and the weight in the appropriate range for that category of equipment and the dropdown selection should autopopulate from that sheet or list. You could use different sheets for each category and have that sheet be the designated range.

Excel (and most other sheet programs) has lookup functions (which require the lookup data be alpha sorted) and matchwhich do not. As long as your labels are the same you can pull the weights in with those.

Otherwise yes, that is the purpose of relational databases (letting you keep gear lists and combine them in different ways.

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