A spread sheet master log.
Over quite a few posts I have mentioned using Excel as a master log, so in this series of posts I am going to cover creating a simple spread sheet. The construct will be a basic log, nothing too fancy. Most plane spotters will already have some notion of what they want to record, so for this exercise I will create a logging sheet that is easy to adapt and use.
I will create the sheet using Excel, for simplicity I will use an older version of Office – to be specific. I will be using MS Office 2008 Excel, not the most up to date version I know. But as this is a basic log it will not matter, this version will have all the required functionality for this exercise.
Some real basic research.
Now, before we charge off and start doing the FAFO thing, lets do some very basic research on what we want in our master log. As I have said in other posts, a master log is a really personal thing. It can be as simple or as complex as you want, containing any information that you can obtain or observe. But for the purposes of these posts, we are going very simple and will record what the Mk 1 eyeball can see – on an airport or airshow visit.
This post is for someone just starting out as a plane spotter, not for some battle hardened spotter with 20 years of history. So the first thing to cover off is what we will have available to us, this is going to be very simple equipment. On the assumption that you have gone to your local airport for the purposes of spotting, what would you take? It doesn’t cover comfort or safety, these are your responsibility as I have no idea what your needs are.
What to take?
So the real short equipment list is as follows, a Notebook, Pen, and Binoculars to read the registration mark and anything else on the aircraft. These items are the bare minimum, you can add others like a phone, a radio, deck chairs, a picnic and in truth anything else you want. But remember that at some locations you may well have to walk around the perimeter to get a clear view, so take what you can carry.
What to record or log?
Now we come to the information that we will need for our master log. The information that we will record at the airport it is what we can see. And that is pretty limited, just have a look at the list below. Bear in mind that for the purposes of this exercise, all you have is a Notebook, Pen and possibly Binoculars.
- I always record the date and the place at the top of the page.
- The registration or serial.
- The aircraft type, manufacturer and model.
- The operator or owner.
I would say that that is pretty much how all spotters started out, but it is down to you to decide,
On to the Spread Sheet.
So how does the above translate to our spread sheet, a simple count shows four unique pieces of information per sighting. We can add the date and location to each sighting, which brings us to six pieces of information. From that we can construct our spread sheet, listed below are the arbitary names that I will assign to the information.
- Registration
- Manufacturer
- Model
- Operator
- Location
- Date
You can add additional space to input more information if you would like, but we are going to start the exercise with just these. We are going for basic, so these are the things I would consider basic.
Not a lesson in Excel!
I should point out that this is not an Excel tutorial, although it will cover some Excel functions. There are tens of thousands of tutorials online if you wish to become an Excel expert, this is a temporary solution to allow time for you to decide on a product or service. You can keep using Excel, after all it is very powerful and a really cheap solution.
The Basic Sheet.
Above is the basic spread sheet setup, I have centered the column headings but nothing else at this point. So there are a couple of steps first and then lets input our sightings.
- Save the spread sheet, choose a name like Master Log.
- Copy it to a backup device like a USB Stick.
Now we can add some sightings, just to see how it looks.
Ready to use.
As you can see from the image above, we now have a very simple spread sheet that we can use to capture our sightings. This is a good start, the data can be searched and edited as required and can be exported easily when the time comes.
Backup, Backup, Backup – did I say Backup.
Now I am going to bang on a bit about backups, about twenty years ago I had a horrible experience where I lost several months of data. The fault was mine, I hadn’t been backing my own system up when I had a hard drive failure. The most recent copy that I had was about four months old, the result was a lot of pain putting data back into my master log.
In part 2.
In part two, we will cover the way we want the spread sheet to look, how to search and how to filter the data. This will make the whole thing easier to use, which will just touch on the power of Excel.
All Photographs Copyright © Dave Munro
Post Author – Dave Munro