I believe one of my earliest posts on B&B was a describing how I was using Microsoft OneNote to track my shaving related purchases, make notes, etc. It had worked OK but was missing some functionality I was looking for like the ability to run macros & formulas so thought I’d check out alternatives. After a bit of trial & error I ended up using Google Sheets.
Importing from OneNote into Sheets wasn’t particularly smooth and ended up being a lot of copy/paste (duplicating work sucks).
I have two sheets, one is for my inventory where each family of items (e.g. contemporary razors, vintage razors, blades, etc.) has its own tab and each item has its own entry with list of common characteristics (e.g. for razors it would be length, weight, blade gap, etc. and for brushes it would be material, loft height, knot diameter, etc.). The other sheet is for my daily shave log/journal where I keep track of what combo of soap, razor, blade, etc. I used, number of passes, a subjective score & brief note.
Given its exclusively cloud based Google Sheets behaves differently than OneNote with one of those differences being Sheets can only store numbers & text and you can’t imbed a raster file like a jpg image. This was a problem since in the inventory sheet I have a picture associated with each product entry. Some searching led to a clever solution, Google Sheets has a function that lets you use a link to an image you have hosted online. So unlike OneNote where you just paste an image onto a given page with Sheets I have all my images stored on imgbb.com (you could use any image hosting site) and link as needed.
This is what the tabs look like for contemporary razors & blades.
I also have a couple of tabs I’ve set up as planograms for brushes, razors & blades. Doesn’t serve any real function other than to keep track of what’s where and how I want to put things out on the shelves.
Master view
Planogram view with actual view for brushes & razors
For the blades I played around and set up a formula so that if I add or delete a tuck from the planogram spreadsheet it will automatically update the table showing tuck & blade count.
If I haven’t put you to sleep yet here’s sheet I have set up as a daily shave log. There’s one tab per month and then a tab that includes all the reference data (i.e. every razor, blade, brush, soap, etc.). Each day I just double click a cell, say “Pre-Shave”, and it will pull up a list of all the pre-shave items I have listed in the reference tab and likewise for each other field. If I add or get rid of an item its just a matter to update the reference tab and that change will appear the next time I add a daily entry.
Sorry for the geek-out but kind of proud of how this turned out and if I shared this with anyone not into wet shaving I’d likely be considered a bit touched.
Thanks for reading
Importing from OneNote into Sheets wasn’t particularly smooth and ended up being a lot of copy/paste (duplicating work sucks).
I have two sheets, one is for my inventory where each family of items (e.g. contemporary razors, vintage razors, blades, etc.) has its own tab and each item has its own entry with list of common characteristics (e.g. for razors it would be length, weight, blade gap, etc. and for brushes it would be material, loft height, knot diameter, etc.). The other sheet is for my daily shave log/journal where I keep track of what combo of soap, razor, blade, etc. I used, number of passes, a subjective score & brief note.
Given its exclusively cloud based Google Sheets behaves differently than OneNote with one of those differences being Sheets can only store numbers & text and you can’t imbed a raster file like a jpg image. This was a problem since in the inventory sheet I have a picture associated with each product entry. Some searching led to a clever solution, Google Sheets has a function that lets you use a link to an image you have hosted online. So unlike OneNote where you just paste an image onto a given page with Sheets I have all my images stored on imgbb.com (you could use any image hosting site) and link as needed.
This is what the tabs look like for contemporary razors & blades.
I also have a couple of tabs I’ve set up as planograms for brushes, razors & blades. Doesn’t serve any real function other than to keep track of what’s where and how I want to put things out on the shelves.
Master view
Planogram view with actual view for brushes & razors
For the blades I played around and set up a formula so that if I add or delete a tuck from the planogram spreadsheet it will automatically update the table showing tuck & blade count.
If I haven’t put you to sleep yet here’s sheet I have set up as a daily shave log. There’s one tab per month and then a tab that includes all the reference data (i.e. every razor, blade, brush, soap, etc.). Each day I just double click a cell, say “Pre-Shave”, and it will pull up a list of all the pre-shave items I have listed in the reference tab and likewise for each other field. If I add or get rid of an item its just a matter to update the reference tab and that change will appear the next time I add a daily entry.
Sorry for the geek-out but kind of proud of how this turned out and if I shared this with anyone not into wet shaving I’d likely be considered a bit touched.
Thanks for reading
