Another Use for Excel??? YES PLEASE!- Learning Project #8

For anyone who knows me well, they learn very quickly that I love to be organized and I love a good spreadsheet. I track all kinds of information and use it for work and personal information. I enjoy using Excel or Google Sheets. So when I saw this post on Reddit about people using Excel or Google Sheets to make beading patterns, I had to give it a go!

So I started by loading up my a fresh Google Sheets and started by first moving the columns to be skinnier so that they were small squares instead of rectangles. This helped me visualize what I was going to design. When I started I thought about doing the Saskatchewan Roughriders logo as my design. I immediately got very overwhelmed by the thought of that and scrapped that idea for something way simpler.

I decided to do a square design that could be used as a little pin or a bookmark. The process of using the spreadsheet to create the pattern was a bit clunky. It took me a bit of time to get used to colouring on the worksheet and I had to do a lot of holding control for picking which squares to colour in. Once I got the hang of it, it wasn’t too bad and I was able to create the design.

Although I can see why some people who bead would use this method, I think that for what I want to bead, the tracing method works a lot better. I do not think that I would be able to try complicated designs using a spreadsheet like how others could.  But overall I think this online source does have some validity for being used, but it isn’t going to work for everyone and I can see why some people don’t enjoy it.

I think I will stick to my original idea of tracing and drawing my own patterns for now!