Excel and Cultivation

Aside from being a huge "here's all the evidence you will ever need" liability, I've found Excel to be exceptionally useful in my journeys into cultivation. I can keep records on all expenses, find out how much each plant costs me to grow. I can see what I didn't need or wasted. I suppose if you were a caregiver you could even keep income on it.

Of course I am an accounting and CIS major.. so this stuff fascinates me.

Lately I have been using Excel as a journal. I put all my updates in it, with a date, type of event, description of the event, and sometimes i add a photo if relevant.

I think it will be awesome to look over it in 3 months and see what happened that shouldn't have and work to avoid it.

Does anyone else use Excel or any other sort of software to help them advance their techniques? Not just nute calculators, even though those are handy, but something a little more in depth.

I kept a log. I can see where a spreadsheet program could be useful, I just couldn't figure out how to plug the numbers for meaningful results (I suck at Excel) I'd love to track growth rates and nute usage, elec costs, etc. Maybe you could write one?

Funny enough I just finished using excel to get organized with my new stealth grow. Nothing fancy, just logged in the seeds I got from Attitude and all of the characteristics. I haven't planted yet so I'm not sure what I will need to keep track of yet as far as stats during the grow. As you know, Excel is a powerful program that can do just about anything but is also simple enough for basic notes and journals.

I'd love to have a computer-based grow room management program that tracks temps, PH fluctations, CO2 levels, etc. There's tons of stuff on YouTube related to this but it is big bucks.

Hey ULMR
I make Excel spreadsheets for a lot of things. For cultivation, I track nutes and expenses. It's a great, easy to use program that can be adapted to almost anything.

But for scheduling I use Microsoft Project. I usually have 8 or 9 grows going at a time from clones to curing. It helps me to plan months in advance and quickly adjusts for any changes. I can quickly check any schedule or scenario that I can imagine. In this way I can fully utilize my resources. It also tracks resource usage and will compile reports and graphs. I admit though that I use only a small part of it's functions.
Really powerful program but a little pricey.
EM

I have used Excel before, but anymore I don't keep much of a journal unless it is a new strain and I am trying to lock down the finer points of a particular pheno/strain. There is a program you can download that a member here on RIU put together and posted it is free and a pretty good program and can be found here https://www.rollitup.org/general-marijuana-growing/345468-free-grow-software.html

Good luck.

ive thought about using excel also. i only grow a few plants for personals though, so i dont really need it. but if i ever get a bigger grow, ill definitely use excel. i think keeping good records is key to growing good. you can see exactly what you did, and based on that, know what to do next.
sometimes us potheads forget the day we last watered, or when we fed nutes. because of this, keeping records has saved me many times

My environmental controller hooks to my CPU and logs on excel spreadsheets the chhc-4 it rules

Joedank said:

My environmental controller hooks to my CPU and logs on excel spreadsheets the chhc-4 it rules

Click to expand...

ooh thats nice. id like to have that haha

If you are legal i can see this being quite good but if you are illegally growing MJ and you get busted (for any reason) then this could also go against you if they see how much you are costing everything in order to see what you need to get back to break even lol.

good idea though. It could come in very handy if you ever do g/kwh/nutes used/equipment cost kind of thing.




J

Joedank said:

My environmental controller hooks to my CPU and logs on excel spreadsheets the chhc-4 it rules

Click to expand...

Where is the jealous emoticon!

Its easy to use Excel just you need to know how to lay it out right.

The thing it would be very useful for is when you are growing and making your own seeds and such.

One thing to be aware of, if you're gonna save records of any kind on comp, get an external HD and PLEASE use True Crypt ( www.truecrypt.org ). It's a free, open source encryption program that will give you true NSA type encryption with AES, Twofish and Serpent encryption. I am speaking from experience here. If the worst were to happen they'll take every comp, digital camera, and cell phone in the house. Hide the external drive somewhere SAFE.