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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?
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.
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