With my new van, I decided to write a spreadsheet to track its fuel efficiency (or lack thereof). This was mostly for my own curiosity and edification but it also creates a great record that is useful later for maintenance. From there, I decided to make a trip estimator as well, to calculate estimated fuel costs when planning travel.
It's pretty simple. To use it, fill in the cells that are white: Date, odometer reading, gallons filled, price per gallon. The sheet will output your fill cost, miles traveled, and miles per gallon. The stuff shaded in gray calculates itself and you can't mess with it. If you know spreadsheets and you want to mess with it, there's no password, just take off the protection. Optionally flag entries which are attributed to highway miles if you want to plan trips based off that figure later. In the trip section, all you have to do is enter the distance and it'll output an estimate based off your average economy and average fuel costs. If you want to fill in a fuel cost (when you know what you'll be paying) you may do so without breaking any formulas. If you know you're going to be taking the highway on a trip, enter 1 in the highway override column and the sheet will figure from entries flagged as highway. You may use both the highway override and the fuel override at the same time or interchangeably.
There are blurbs that come up for any cells that aren't self-evident. Anywhere 1 is used to flag highway values etc, 0 or blank will undo it. There are graphs on page two which show economy over time as well as distance traveled by date. These can be used to see a correlation between your economy and long trips. They are also conceivably useful for diagnosing mechanical issues - for example, a drop in efficiency with o2 sensor malfunction.
Here's the file as an xlsx:
http://www.filedropper.com/economyspreadsheet
Here's the file as an ods:
http://www.filedropper.com/economyspreadsheet_1
If you don't have Excel, and you're not aware of Open Office, you can download it here for free:
https://www.openoffice.org/
If you use Open Office instead of Excel, the graphs probably won't look right, but everything else will work.
It's possible you may have to turn off pop-up blockers for those download links to work. If anyone has an alternate host I can email the files or whatever. Hope someone else enjoys them!
It's pretty simple. To use it, fill in the cells that are white: Date, odometer reading, gallons filled, price per gallon. The sheet will output your fill cost, miles traveled, and miles per gallon. The stuff shaded in gray calculates itself and you can't mess with it. If you know spreadsheets and you want to mess with it, there's no password, just take off the protection. Optionally flag entries which are attributed to highway miles if you want to plan trips based off that figure later. In the trip section, all you have to do is enter the distance and it'll output an estimate based off your average economy and average fuel costs. If you want to fill in a fuel cost (when you know what you'll be paying) you may do so without breaking any formulas. If you know you're going to be taking the highway on a trip, enter 1 in the highway override column and the sheet will figure from entries flagged as highway. You may use both the highway override and the fuel override at the same time or interchangeably.
There are blurbs that come up for any cells that aren't self-evident. Anywhere 1 is used to flag highway values etc, 0 or blank will undo it. There are graphs on page two which show economy over time as well as distance traveled by date. These can be used to see a correlation between your economy and long trips. They are also conceivably useful for diagnosing mechanical issues - for example, a drop in efficiency with o2 sensor malfunction.
Here's the file as an xlsx:
http://www.filedropper.com/economyspreadsheet
Here's the file as an ods:
http://www.filedropper.com/economyspreadsheet_1
If you don't have Excel, and you're not aware of Open Office, you can download it here for free:
https://www.openoffice.org/
If you use Open Office instead of Excel, the graphs probably won't look right, but everything else will work.
It's possible you may have to turn off pop-up blockers for those download links to work. If anyone has an alternate host I can email the files or whatever. Hope someone else enjoys them!
