Solo Technology

I’m on a bit of a weight-loss kick these past few weeks. One of my goals is to log everything I eat and also the gym work-outs. After a couple weeks of this, I’m still wrestling a bit with what might be the best way to track this goal.

Initially I was using DietTV’s site. While functional and easy on the eyes, I got a bit frustrated with not always being able to find the foods I wanted to log. Yes, that’s easily solved with an email to them, but I’m pretty much a instant gratification kind of guy. Since I couldn’t add the foods myself, I eventually moved on. (it is still a really cool site though!)

I spent a couple hours looking for Pocket PC solutions, but didn’t find anything all that exciting. I’d sure like to though, so I’m open to ideas if anyone has suggestions.

I found a nice spreadsheet from Jeremy Zawodny that I quickly adapted and modified to suit my own needs. What he had was a great nudge towards figuring out what I wanted to really track.

Initially, I opted to work with it online as a Google Docs sheet. Why Google Docs? At work and at home I almost always have a Google site up; email, search, calendar, whatever. Following their links to Docs is quick and easy. So, I created the sheet online and shared it out to my several accounts so I could always get to it quickly.

I made it about a week before I realized I needed to find a better option. Google always opens the sheet at the top/left corner — not where I was when I last saved it. I know it sounds petty, but that was driving me nuts! Also, I like to build formulas without touching the mouse. I prefer to just type the function name, open paren and then shift-arrow around to select cells followed by a close paren. Perhaps weird, but that’s how I roll — except with Google.

Oh, and the mobile version for spreadsheets is horrid. That’s worthy of an entire post some day, but suffice it to say: blech. One column at a time, seriously?

I got my HTC Mogul and decided maybe I could use it to track everything. I exported my sheet from Google Docs and copied it over. Well, Pocket Excel is tolerable, but I’m not quite comfortable enough to be very productive with lots of spreadsheet work at this resolution. However, a side effect of the trial is that I was syncing the spreadsheet from my laptop, so the current copy is always there.

That led me to the OpenOffice Calc phase that has kept me rolling thus far. I don’t need to grab a mouse or a stylus and everything works as I’d expect. Since the spreadsheet is no longer online, however, I’m tied to my laptop or, assuming I’ve synced recently, my Mogul to make updates. For now, this is the status quo while I explore more… interesting… options.

For instance, I spent several hours this evening playing around with Zoho Creator. This is a clever online application builder that seems rather powerful. I’m experimenting with building a little web-app to track food items, consumption and exercise and rather impressed thus far.

I’m sure this will cause howls from the Zoho lads, but it’s a lot like building an MS Access application, but online. Define your Forms (called Tables in Access) and their fields, create some Views (aka Forms in Access) and, if necessary, use the Deluge scripting stuff to tack on a bit of logic or validation. I have just a few things to figure out and I might have something useful soon.

It seems to work nicely on my mobile IE browser as well.

Speaking of Access though, there are some options to use access data on a Pocket PC. I haven’t done much digging in that direction yet, but that could be an interesting approach. I could do the more data-entry intensive stuff on the PC (for instance, creating the food and exercise items) but the logging from the Mogul.

And finally, I could just build my own (private) web app for this as well. Maybe a little php/MySQL action…. Something for the spare time…

3 Responses to “Spreadsheet on the Move”

1. Pete on November 4th, 2007 1:06 am
   

   Chris,

   Just last June Lifehacker declared that Zoho Creator was “like Microsoft Access online” and based on the response from the Zoho folks, they didn’t mind that comparison at all…

2. Andy on November 4th, 2007 9:14 am
   

   I am looking at doing the same thing. I was going to try to use wordpress to track my progress. I found a couple of plugins that make graphs.
   http://www.pasi.fi/simple-graph-wordpress-plugin/
   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-hackers-diet/

   I’ll have to look into Zoho Creator

   Thanks

3. Chris on November 4th, 2007 9:44 pm
   

   @Pete - good deal, glad I didn’t insult anyone! Cool site you have there (landofzohocreator.com).

   @Andy - That second plugin is rather slick. I might have to give it a closer squint.

   ZC is pretty cool — I wrote a bit more about it this evening.

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