Travel Mileage Spreadsheet

[Alie&Jim's Carrilite]

I'm trying to find, or build an Excel spreadsheet that will calculate various travel functions.

Things like total vehicle mileage, RV towed mileage, truck bobtail mileage, last oil change mileage, RV lube/ bearing inspection, plus other mileage or timed maintenance items.

 

Does anyone have a spreadsheet that they would like to share? I realize that one forum may not fit all, but in 3 years of messing with the idea, I still have data on 2-3 separate sheets.

 

 

[Jimalberta]

Lol...thats way too much organization for me.....I just drive the beast and enjoy the scenery.

[rambler62]

agree with Jim. Maybe if I was retired full time and had nothing else to do but for now, put the gas, food and beer [ repeat beer] and go.

[budeneighe]

I have seen a few tools for professional truck drivers that do most of that in maintaining maintenance logs of trucks and each trailer. Might start looking through some of the truck drivers / operators sites and magazines for ideas.

 

maybe this will get you started:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=I+need+a+truck+and+trailer+maintenance+log

[bruce t]

It's not a 'big' deal. Excel will allow you to have sheets within each file. So you can put various figures on a sheet and refer to those figures automatically in other sheets. It's just a matter of sitting down and going through the logic.

I suggest you find one of those old fashioned things called a pencil. Find some paper and write down what answers you want. Forget the computer for awhile. You have to know the answers before you can create the formulas! So create a page for each function. Truck mileage/rv mileage/oil change etc etc. Then note what you want and how to achieve that figure. That's one sheet. Do the same for the other sheets. Once done you can create one final sheet for all your answers. On that sheet you can put a formula such as ='truck fuel'!$c$20. 'truck fuel' is the name of your sheet with the truck fuel calculations. ! tells the sheet you are working on that 'truck fuel' is the name of the sheet with the truck fuel calculations. $c$20 is the cell with the answer in it.

 

Just do one bit at a time. Don't over think it.

 

regards

[Alie&Jim's Carrilite]

Bruce, I already have several that I made or downloaded. Some are truckers versions, or professional that have values locked unless you buy the paid version. No big deal.

I was just curious as to what other do, or keep as far as easy to maintain, access, and use.

[bruce t]

OK I'm a bit of a numbers 'nutter'. I keep spreadsheets as a 'hobby'!!! Well not really but they do create a bit of an interest. I've always found that over thinking the complexity is a major problem for most folks. Keep it simple and let it grow. But be very clear in the first place about what answers you want. Working back to find the solutions is always easier than bumbling along hope the answer will appear. Know what you want your spreadsheet to do.

 

IMHO a spread sheet is a very custom item. No two users will need/want the same information. As a result you may find those already available of little use.

 

regards

[budeneighe]

Sometimes, the gap between thinking you know what you will want to know and what you will actually need and find useful, can be a "You can't get there from here!" situation. I find it more useful to prototype what I think I will want and then start asking it questions I anticipate wanting to know months or years down the road. The dummy data is almost irrelevant to see but the way it relates is what is important to me.

 

Often, to get to what I really need, I have to find more than one tool that can export its data into a form I can manipulate and eventually import into a spreadsheet to combine with data sourced elsewhere. It takes some time to work this out.

 

I just finished a spreadsheet (is any SS ever really finished?) which takes input from the old RV Plan-n-Go 2013 trip planning software and combines it with current data from Gas Buddy, RVPark Reviews, Good Sam's Travel planner and individual websites of the RV parks to estimate fuel costs, lodging, mileage and time factors for a planned trip. Changing fuel costs was the hard part as we changed locations. After working and changing it for the last several years, I found that the exact fuel costs in places we traveled, was not enough of a change in total costs to be worth the trouble to keep them updated with automatic web queries. So now I just use the avg fuel cost in the US as my base.

 

The other big problem I have found is that in almost all cases, I want to build a historical database of snapshots to see how trends change over long periods. SS do not do this easily and just making copies of the SS and then trying to go back months/years later and find a way to string old sheets together to get a sense of what has happened is fraught with a lot of conflicts as each sheet evolves to be better than the previous version. It's only when I get some number of these older versions trended that I start to see what is really important and what is only presumed to be important to know.