I am rubbish at filling in diaries, but I have heard a lot of talk about people using excel or someother kind of spreadsheet for collecting data regarding number of units, cravings etc on here. .

Was just wondering if anyone had one of these that they had created to help newbies like myself. Seems better than trying to keep re-inventing the wheel.

Thank you in advance if anyone has. I think being able to see things in graph format over the weeks would be very helpful.

Units? Blah, blah, blah. It's all relative.

Just note the number of drinks - whatever your poison - you do on average. Be honest. Pre-Sinclair. . .how many shots/glasses of wine/beers. . .do/did you do? Again, be honest. You're only comparing yourself to yourself. It's not a test, or a competition. Hey - we're all AKLIES.

Now. Take that number as your 'unit.' (I know, I'm being VERY creative here - but also very LOGICAL.) Use it as your base point.

Keep track, daily, of your personal units. See how the numbers rise, and fall. (Cry . . . sometimes. It's OK.)

The good news is, over several months' time, you will see a dramatic change in the overall units consumed.

Rejoice. You've discovered something that will set your life back on course.

Hi Sober,

Mine is simple, just like W2E's except I'm also keeping track of nicotine gums which I chew like a madman when I drink. I also have a small section I use to calculate monthly totals and averages. The fun part for me is seeing the progress (or lack thereof) in multicolor charts. It's pretty simple - definitely not rocket surgery If you want to see it PM me and I'll send it to you.

Like I've said elsewhere, I don't use "units" as my measure (they don't sound like they taste very good). I use "drinks" based on a tall boy PBR can. That way when I think of having a drink I know it's going under the "drinks" column on my record.

cheers, Fire

Firebird I like your style!!!! LOL Drinks sounds so much easier!

New to the board and found this topic while playing around with making a spreadsheet. I started with some formula I found in a quick google -- (ml*%)/1000 -- but that seems to yield almost exactly double the 5 or 5.5 units/bottle of wine I had expected. The 12 oz light beer was coming out about right though. Oh well, after reading this topic I suspect it's not really worth it for me to worry about variances in % by variety of wine. Counting "drinks" is simple enough given my goal is to get down to "just two and stop." I drink roughly a bottle of wine or 2-4 beers every day, so that should be easy enough to keep track of.

I'm a gadget hound and love graphs and whatnot, so it would be awesome if someone with appropriate skills could create an iPhone app for tracking progress. I'd be willing to track in any units for that convenience.

Update: Oops. Just searched the App store and similar things seem to exist (drinks calculators at least). Will check some out.

I use 8 columns in mine

It isn't as complicated as it sounds though

The columns are:

Day
Date
Number of days since start
Units
Craving
Bottle Start
Bottle End
Drinks outside home

The columns in green above are the main ones obviously
The first three make it easy to sort or plot trends - e.g. are there patterns (that I don't already know ), or to plot nice graphs
The two columns in red, I just put a 1 if I start/finish a bottle on that day - that way, since I know how many units are in a bottle, I can double check my consumption - which can be easily understimated if you have a 'heavy hand' when pouring drinks
The final column in orange, I use to track the number of units I drink when I go out - which are normally easier to track than those I drink at home (and it makes it easier to track how many I drink at home by seeing how long each bottle lasts)