Sarah, Tom and I are trying to nail down exactly how much time we have and what additional adventures we need to build into our itinerary. Unfortunately, we don’t have an easy way to edit our timetable. We can’t, for example conceptualize and discuss what would happen if we added a day in N’Orleans or are running a couple hours late at the Grand Canyon. Could we end up having to drive through the Rocky Mountains at night? Would we plan our way into a position where we are visiting a museum when it is closed? Might we end up finding ourselves in a mad dash at the end or with extra time that we could have spent more productively earlier in the trip. I certainly don’t know. Don’t look at me like that. Neither do you. Nobody knows.
UNTIL NOW!
I did the best work that I have ever done in Excel today. I know how excited everyone must be. I won’t bore you with the details of the formulas as much as I did Sarah. You can look for yourself if you like. If you are familiar with conditional formatting in Excel (or want to find out more,) select any colored cell and on the menu bar select Format>Conditional Formatting. Even though I promised to spare the technical details, I will share some of the more interesting aspects. Below the name of each location, there is a rough visual representation of the length of time we are spending in that particular location, rounded to the nearest third of a day. By looking at the colors of the times that we are arriving or departing a location, you can judge quickly whether we are leaving or arriving to a city morning, daytime, evening, or night, which are represented by orange, yellow, purple, and gray, respectively. Longer driving times are also indicated by color changes. Adding time in one city pushes back the schedule for all the others.
So download it and have a quick look if you like. I would love to get suggestions on ways to improve the format. And if anyone would like to use this to plan their own adventure feel free, but if you feel inclined please let me know and tell me about what you are doing.
-Joey Salvucci
p.s. The dates and times currently in the template are very tentative.
| triptimeline01-08-09.xls | |
| File Size: | 93 kb |
| File Type: | xls |
