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Microsoft Excel To The Rescue

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Microsoft Excel saves us so much time!

If you're an office dweller or a small business owner, you're likely well-acquainted with Excel.  You likely either love it or hate it.

The thing about Excel is that it puts incredible power at your fingertips.  We've been building a whopper workbook since "day 1" (4 years ago)!  Cheryl was initially a nay-sayer, but she's on board now :)

Here are its important tabs and what they do:
  1. Overview - A 10,000ft expense and decision-making dashboard
  2. Legs - Our comings and goings in an easy-to-use list that helps with quick 'what if' scenarios 
  3. Accommodations - A list of confirmation numbers and the websites used for bookings
  4. Flights - A list of confirmation numbers, check-in/boarding times, airlines, durations, etc.
  5. Car Rentals - A list of our car rentals/leases with confirmation numbers, companies, kiosk locations, pickup times, insurance 
  6. Destinations - A list of cities and the countries they're in (referenced by the other tabs)
  7. Activities - A list of our experiences with city/country, travel to/from, cost and an IN/OUT flag so we can easily add/remove an activity to stay on budget
  8. TODOs - All our deadlines :)
There are many more 'helper' tabs that bring order to the chaos.

Using Excel saves us an enormous amount of time!  For instance, when Sri Lanka recently experienced a major terror attack, we were able to remove it from our 'Legs' and replace it with Malaysia, quickly understand the cost and scheduling constraints and book new accommodations in the span of a few minutes.

Globetrotting with a family can be daunting... efficiency tools like this one help us reduce stress in potentially stressful situations by quickly answering questions like: we just missed our ferry, what will that 'do to us'?  It also takes the guesswork out of 'this' or 'that' questions like: If we splurge on a Safari, what will we have to drop to stay on budget? 

We highly recommend using Excel in the cloud because it enables you to have a workbook open on your phones and tablets simultaneously, and edit them in parallel - awesome!

I'll try to share more about our workbook in the future - I know some of you are thinking "nerd alert, nerd alert!" and possibly even pushing your glasses up your noses... well... you're right, but don't knock it until you have a better solution!

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