I’m looking for advice on how to store & analyze my data. I use many different apps for tracking. I have numerical data from 1-5 and other data from 1-10. Some data are names of foods and so on. The date formats are completely different.
In this video I explain my current setup and my problem in depth.
I get “this video is private”.
I tried to post again with a new link
Hi Lars, I had a look at your video and I think I can be of help. In fact I have been working on a video series to help organise and compare data from different sources in a spreadsheet.
The mental leap for me using spreadsheets to analyse data was not to be afraid of lots of columns and lots of white space. You can add all of your data in sequence, sharing a date column but then using only the relevant columns for the different types of data.
So you’d want to end up with something like this:
Then each column can be a different series on a chart.
I show a few different ways to marshal dates into consistent formats in my videos.
It will be easier to normalise the scales once you can see everything on a chart. Often it doesn’t really matter, as long as you can see the direction your data is going, but you can always tweak it by introducing different multipliers.
Sometimes you will break it out even further - so for my happiness charts sometimes I’ll create columns for “unhappy”, “neutral” and “happy” entries. Again, it’s all about being able to add different series, aka columns, to your charts.
See if my videos help you think about this, and also note that my next video will be about cross referencing fitness data from multiple sources with my happiness data.
I would love to be able to support your use cases in my Changes app. It’s organised around happiness tracking but it would be easy to track symptoms and other factors alongside these values. For now you’d need to use hashtags but I have been considering adding the ability to add custom scales to entries. I think it would be really useful for me to work with you to develop this feature.
My video series is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iox2MD9N_g8&list=PLj666SNUOQu2zuQsHqkTF1JzqsJyJnYoT
My tracking app is here: https://goodtohear.co.uk/changes
