Templates for Daily Shave Log and Shave Hardware & Software Directory

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Hello,

As mentioned in my OCD thread I've put together a number of templates for Google Sheets & Microsoft Excel.

There are two templates, one to keep a directory of your shave hardware & software and another to track your daily shaves. Each are available in formats for Google Drive (where it’s stored in the cloud) or for Microsoft Excel (where it’s stored on your hard drive). At the risk of being pedantic I’m stressing these are templates; please DO NOT use these versions to store your information. Instead, refer to the instructions below on how to obtain copies for your own use.

These instructions are written for the Google Sheets version. While the Excel templates can be found through the same URL there are some difference in the two platforms. I'm working on the Excel user guide and will post it when available.

I welcome any questions, comments, recommendations or constructive criticism.

Thank-you again and hopefully you find these tools useful!

Happy shaving,

Kal

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

User Guide - Google Sheets Edition
Rev 1.0 - April 2018

Introduction
1. To access & make use of this templates, you must have a Google account (i.e. Gmail).

2. These templates are hosted in a public and unsecure location and as such are not intended to store any user specific or private data. To store your data the template must first be copied to your Google Drive.

3. Any data inadvertently stored in these templates will be periodically deleted. Data stored in your saved copy is managed, retained/deleted and viewable exclusively by you.

4. When referring to the pictures in this guide anything highlighted or identified in red indicates an action you need to complete, anything in green is for information only. There are no locked, password protected or hidden cells, pages or other content in any of the templates.

These templates are “freeware” and made available using the Creative Commons license agreement.
(CC) 2018 - Canadian Mountain Man - Rev 1.0.0418
Summary & Complete Software License Agreement can be found at: Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0


Creating Your Copy of either the Shave Hardware & Software Directory or the Daily Shave Log

1. Go to: http://bit.do/bosc
*If you’d like to type out the full URL its: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xjwZaS-KMXprvvBsWEdSg335TxC_2xC7

2. Right click on either Shave Hardware & Software Directory (Google Sheets) or Daily Shave Log (Google Sheets)* and select “Make A Copy”
*depending on your view settings the files may appear as either an icon or the full file name

3. Google will create a copy of the Daily Shave Log in your Google Drive’s root directory, select “Locate”

4. Right click the file and rename as desired.

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Using the Daily Shave Log

1. Open the Daily Shave Log from your Google Drive.

2. There are fundamentally four different families of data being captured:
- Products used in your daily shave
- A “score” on how those products performed & your objective score of the entire shave
- The number of passes for that day’s shave
- A notes field to record miscellaneous information about a particular shave

The products are fairly self-explanatory and is where you enter what razor, brush, soap, etc. you used for a particular shave. Refer to section 3 for the steps to add items to your hardware & software inventory.

The objective scoring is based on a weighted 1-10 ranking of each component of your shave including:
- Pre-Shave (represented by PSz) and weighted at roughly 4:100
- Soap (represented by Sz) and weighted at roughly 20:100
- Brush (represented by Bz) and weighted at roughly 8:100
- Razor (represented by Rz) and weighted at roughly 17:100
- Blade (represented by BLz) and weighted at roughly 17:100
- User - your overall impression or feeling of the shave (represented by Xz) and weighted at roughly 34:100

The aggregate daily score (represented by Dz) is automatically calculated. If you don’t want to enter unique scoring elements for each item you can simply add your score in the Dz field and it will be included in the monthly & yearly averages.

The formula to calculate Dz is “AVERAGE((D2*0.25),(F2*1.25),(H2*0.5),(J2*1),(L2*1),(O2*2))” and can edited at your discretion.


3. You’ll need to customize the spreadsheet to reflect your own selection of razors, soaps, etc. Go to the “!#” tab which contains the master list of all your hardware & software you’d like to include in your log.

Once your items have been added to their respective columns they will automatically be available in the shave log pages (i.e. if you add “Gillette Fatboy” as one of your razors in the “!#” tab it will appear in the “2018” tab when you enter the razor for a particular day’s shave).

The “!#” tab is currently configured to manage up to 100 items can be stored in each product family (i.e. 100 razors, 100 brushes, etc.), if you require additional capacity use the Insert Row function between rows 2 and 101 on the “!#” tab and it will update the tables on the log pages.


4. Return to the “2018” tab and start entering the information from your daily shaves. Data can be entered in the cells one of two ways; either double-click a cell to bring up a list of the items you’ve entered in the reference “!#” tab or start typing and Google Sheets will begin to auto-populate the contents based on that list.

5. If needed you can make an ad hoc entry to any field on the log tabs without having to update the list in the “!#” tab (e.g. you’re using a PIF’d blade you have no intention of adding to your regular inventory), Google Sheets will simply identify the entry with a small red dot in the corner of the cell.

6. Should you have either a day where you don’t shave or don’t use a particular product you can either leave the cell(s) blank or enter “No Shave” or “NS”, the monthly and yearly averages will still be calculated without an error.


7. The default view is for the whole year; to view only specific months click on the drop down icon in cell A1 and select which months you’d like to view. Google Sheets will remember these settings the next time you open the file.

8. To add a new tab for subsequent years right click on the “Template” tab and select “Duplicate” and rename accordingly.

9. The “Randomizer” tab is updated automatically by the entries in the “!#” tab.

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Using the Shave Hardware & Software Directory sheet

1. Open the Shave Hardware & Software Directory sheet.

There are six dedicated product tabs to inventory your razors, blades, etc. and two generic hardware & software tabs for miscellaneous items.

2. Each product tab has five blank item templates and each of those templates has a number of specification fields that are unique for that particular family of product (i.e. Blade Gap in the Razor tabs and Lather Firmness in the Soaps/Creams tab, etc,). These specifications should be intuitive for wet shavers.

Some of these specification fields link back to the “!#” tab and can be identified as with a cell containing a drop-down arrow.

Contemporary Razors & Vintage Razors Tabs:
- Razor Mfg
- Razor Mechanism
- Exposure
- Material
-Comb

Brushes Tab:
- Brush Mfg
- Brush Type
- Brush Body

Soap/Cream Tab:
- Soap
- Type
- Scent Strength

Scents Tab:
- Temp
- Notes
- Scent Strength

There are a number of common fields in all the product tabs:
- Yes/No
- Number - Used as a ranking measurement
- Available - Whether or not the product is still currently being produced (yes) or would be considered vintage)
- Out - Whether the product is currently on display in your den (yes) or is in storage, a dopp kit, etc. (no)
- Ranking - A subjective ranking of 1-10
- Acquired* - When and where the item was purchased
- Origin* - Country of manufacture
- Price*
*these fields are not linked to the “!#” tab

All of the information contained in the “!#” tab, including the nondescript entries like “Razor 1” can be updated to reflect your individual inventory.

3. To add additional product templates select the complete rows (i.e. not just the cells) of an existing group, copy using Ctrl-C*, move cursor and click the bottom cell on the left, paste using Ctrl-V*

*While Google Sheets works best with Google Chrome it is still compatible with most other browsers like Internet Explorer & Firefox. However, with non-Google browser some “right button” mouse functions like copy & paste will not work and you’ll need to use keyboard commands as described above.


4. To embed pictures of your shave hardware and software in this Google sheet follow these steps.
a. You’ll need an account on an image hosting site like postimages.org or imgbb.com

b. upload your picture as instructed by the hosting site

c. Copy the direct file link (its the one with the file’s complete URL and file extension like .jpg or .png)

d. Each item template has a cell in column C thats been pre-populated with the formula =image("url of hosted image”)*, go to that cell for the item you want to link a picture.
*Because there are no pictures linked in the template the formula isn’t visible at this stage.

e. Press F2 to edit the contents, select the green text and replace it with the direct file link you copied in step “c”. Leave the quote marks intact at the beginning and end of the link.

 

[Senate515]

Thanks for sharing your hard work. Now to figure it all out


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[sarimento1]

Hello,

As mentioned in my OCD thread I've put together a number of templates for Google Sheets & Microsoft Excel.

There are two templates, one to keep a directory of your shave hardware & software and another to track your daily shaves. Each are available in formats for Google Drive (where it’s stored in the cloud) or for Microsoft Excel (where it’s stored on your hard drive). At the risk of being pedantic I’m stressing these are templates; please DO NOT use these versions to store your information. Instead, refer to the instructions below on how to obtain copies for your own use.

These instructions are written for the Google Sheets version. While the Excel templates can be found through the same URL there are some difference in the two platforms. I'm working on the Excel user guide and will post it when available.

I welcome any questions, comments, recommendations or constructive criticism.

Thank-you again and hopefully you find these tools useful!

Happy shaving,

Kal

Great effort, Sir Kal!
I tried something similar several years ago, vis a vis a Wordpress app.
But, much too time-consuming.
After a while, I switched over to a Pinterest app, keyed on pics of the SOTD.
Works great for me.

 

[topcattcw]

Thanks Kal,
I downloaded and started playing around with the excel sheets... awesome work! Thanks for doing this work and sharing with us.



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[Rhody]

Amazing work

 

[Senate515]

@Canadian Mountain Man I've started playing with the hardware and software directory, my question is should there be a dropdown like the razor tab in the soap tab? If not where do you add the name of soaps. The amount of detail in the info you've included is amazing. Thank you again

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Thanks as always for the kind words

@Senate515, great suggestion & I've made the change in both versions.

I've also made a few minor revisions:
-added a "change log" tab (more for my reference but will let users see when functionality has been added, bugs fixed etc.)
-in the !# reference tab of the directory templates made the default list of manufacturers common for razors, brushes & soaps

And I've set up a Google form if someone would like to provide anonymous feedback on requested changes or to report a bug:
Feature Request & Bug Report

 

[Senate515]

Thanks as always for the kind words

@Senate515, great suggestion & I've made the change in both versions.

I've also made a few minor revisions:
-added a "change log" tab (more for my reference but will let users see when functionality has been added, bugs fixed etc.)
-in the !# reference tab of the directory templates made the default list of manufacturers common for razors, brushes & soaps

And I've set up a Google form if someone would like to provide anonymous feedback on requested changes or to report a bug:
Feature Request & Bug Report

Thank you. It was more of a question, I thought I was doing something wrong. I’m not super spreadsheet smart


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Thank you. It was more of a question, I thought I was doing something wrong. I’m not super spreadsheet smart

all good

Its a shaving spreadsheet, don't think its possible to do anything wrong with it....and hey, I thought it was a very smart comment/question/suggestion

 

[Jaidmaster]

Pretty cool. Any plans to add the randomizer to the excel workbook?

Thanks for sharing your work!

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Quite welcome!

And yes, the randomizer has just been added to the Excel version.

 

[Dave in KY]

Above my brain capabilities but really nice of you to do this for everone @Kal

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Thanks Dave.

Truth be told I enjoy playing with spreadsheets

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Afternoon folks,

A few things....

1) Still trying to add this to the wiki

2) Thanks for the user who submitted a feature request; unfortunately I neglected to add how I should follow up so am posting a summary here:

In the Daily Shave Log the user would like to have the option to have two razors & blades entered per day (one for the face, one for the head).

Is there a way to know how many shaves we had with the same blade?
​

Regarding the dual razors/blades, should I take it that shaving your head isn't something you do every day? How would you like to see the razor & blade scoring differentiated? That is, would you want to be able to look back at a particular month and see how a razor & blade preformed specifically for a face or head shave or can it be blended into just a common scoring regardless of where you used the razors & blades?

Regarding the number of shaves with a particular blade I think it could be accomplished with the counter function in both Sheets & Excel. The only thing I'm trying to figure out in my head is how to reset it when you open a new blade but still keep track of the number of times the last version of the same blade was used. Assigning a unique identifier or serial number to individual blades is possible, just not practical IMO. @Dovo1695 had an interesting suggestion with RFID tags and a great way to classify everything but we're stepping well outside the scope of these templates (and candidly the work I'm prepared to put in).

Please send me a PM or if you'd like post a response here.

p.s. thank you yes, had a great weekend and hope likewise!

3) I thought the Randomizer was a little cloogy with the Ctrl-R or Shift-R to refresh and wanted something more tactile (I'm trying to keep in mind that some users might be accessing the templates on a tablet or phone and keystrokes aren't ideal). This is what it would look like in Google Sheets, just check/uncheck the box (Excel would be similar but would be a refresh button):

Not sure if anyone is using the Randomizer but if they are what would you prefer, the xxxx-R keystrokes or the tactile version?

4) I've been playing with some different reporting/BI tools to generate reports/graphs (e.g. a report that would identify the best (or worst, most often used, etc) pre-shave/razor/blade/etc. combination, different scoring profiles based on the item). While possible to do this natively with Sheet and Excel having a dashboard where you could quickly visualize the data would be cool. Its turning into a bit of a time suck but if you're capturing all the daily shave information & scores would be nice to put it to use.

 

[Dovo1695]

This is absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to play with this!

 

[Tokyospike]

Nice work, Kal! You’re a credit to the brotherhood.

 

[topcattcw]

Afternoon folks,

A few things....

1) Still trying to add this to the wiki

2) Thanks for the user who submitted a feature request; unfortunately I neglected to add how I should follow up so am posting a summary here:

In the Daily Shave Log the user would like to have the option to have two razors & blades entered per day (one for the face, one for the head).

Is there a way to know how many shaves we had with the same blade?
​

Regarding the dual razors/blades, should I take it that shaving your head isn't something you do every day? How would you like to see the razor & blade scoring differentiated? That is, would you want to be able to look back at a particular month and see how a razor & blade preformed specifically for a face or head shave or can it be blended into just a common scoring regardless of where you used the razors & blades?

Regarding the number of shaves with a particular blade I think it could be accomplished with the counter function in both Sheets & Excel. The only thing I'm trying to figure out in my head is how to reset it when you open a new blade but still keep track of the number of times the last version of the same blade was used. Assigning a unique identifier or serial number to individual blades is possible, just not practical IMO. @Dovo1695 had an interesting suggestion with RFID tags and a great way to classify everything but we're stepping well outside the scope of these templates (and candidly the work I'm prepared to put in).

Please send me a PM or if you'd like post a response here.

p.s. thank you yes, had a great weekend and hope likewise!

3) I thought the Randomizer was a little cloogy with the Ctrl-R or Shift-R to refresh and wanted something more tactile (I'm trying to keep in mind that some users might be accessing the templates on a tablet or phone and keystrokes aren't ideal). This is what it would look like in Google Sheets, just check/uncheck the box (Excel would be similar but would be a refresh button):

Not sure if anyone is using the Randomizer but if they are what would you prefer, the xxxx-R keystrokes or the tactile version?

4) I've been playing with some different reporting/BI tools to generate reports/graphs (e.g. a report that would identify the best (or worst, most often used, etc) pre-shave/razor/blade/etc. combination, different scoring profiles based on the item). While possible to do this natively with Sheet and Excel having a dashboard where you could quickly visualize the data would be cool. Its turning into a bit of a time suck but if you're capturing all the daily shave information & scores would be nice to put it to use.

I also use dual razors and blades on occasion - sometimes using one razor for the first pass (usually my feather a/c), then two passes with another razor. I just copied the I-M columns, and renamed Razor and Blade to Razor1, Blade1,Razor2, Blade2 - and when I use only one razor, just leave Razor2 and Blade2 blank.. seems to work okay.. Also need to add the new columns #s to the weighted average score for each day that I use two razors and blades.

Very interested in the reporting that you’re playing around with!


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