You probably have Microsoft Office installed on your computer. If not your home computer, your “day job” work computer. Even Mac users often splurge and purchase the Mac version of Windows. But if you’ve never had an office job where you used Excel extensively, you might not be aware of all that it can do. Sure. It’s handy for making lists of things, but then what? Well, there’s a lot you can do with this workhorse of a tool that reaches beyond the corporate world. In this installment of the Tech-Savvy Singer, we’ll explore creating a spreadsheet to keep track of your auditions.
What Information Do You Want to Track?
There’s a lot of data you can gather about your audition history. Obviously, you want the name of the company you applied for, and you’ll probably want to keep track of whether you heard back from them or whether you need to follow up. But beyond that, preferences will vary. You may like to keep the phone number and address of the company handy—or you may think that’s a silly amount of typing for something you almost never use. Sure, it made sense back in the day where you had to send off postcards to get YAP audition material. (Anyone else remember this? Anyone?) But nowadays you’re not likely to send snail mail or call the receptionist, so you might not want to write down every address and phone number.
You probably want to know the date you auditioned, but what about what arias you sang? Who was on the panel? Who was your accompanist? Some people love to log a whole diary of information, such as what they wore and what they had for lunch beforehand, but others just want to sing well and be reminded whom they need to follow up with. But it’s easier to decide now, before you create your spreadsheet, than to go back and try to add information later.
So, is more or less info better? Well, it’s easier to delete columns if you decide you’re not using them enough—but on the other hand, you’ll be more likely to use this tool if it’s clean and simple. The answer probably depends on your personality. If you’re highly organized or OCD, you might like to keep track of absolutely everything—but if you are running around with your hands full all the time, you might want to keep typing to a minimum.
For the purposes of this example, the information I’m going to track and why is listed on the table on the opposite page.
Label Your Columns
Once you’ve decided what pieces of information you’re going to track, enter those items as column headers in Excel. For now, that will mean just making a normal row, but later on we will turn this info into a table so that they can become column headers.
My columns will be Company, E-mail, Audition Type, Date Sent, Audition Offered?, Date Auditioned, Status, Response, and Notes. Translated into Excel, that means box A1 will read “Company,” box B1 will say “E-mail,” and so on down the line.
Because we are going to make a table out of this, you don’t actually have to use the first row. If you prefer some white space at the top or to the sides, you can start your headers anywhere. For example, you could put “Company” into C4, “E-mail” into D4, etc. However, I usually start with A1.
You may decide after going through this tutorial that you don’t want your data in a table after all, and if you turn off the “tableness,” it will be simpler to control your columns if you are starting from the top. For example, if you want to sort data alphabetically, it’s easier to click on “C” to select the whole column than to drag and select just the columns you are using. So, the tech-savvy singer says to start your data in the upper-left corner, just in case.
Make Drop-Down Lists
Some information, like the company name or contact e-mail, will be different for every (or almost every) row. Other info, though, will be multiple choice. Let’s take Audition Type, for example. There are a limited number of audition types: mainstage, YAP, competition, maybe grad school. It might be easier to select one of these options from a list instead of retyping them manually. This also provides the benefit of consistency. If you call the same type of audition “YAP” in one place, “Young Artist Program” in another, and “Apprenticeship” in a third, you will have problems later when you try to sort alphabetically, filter for just one type of audition, or run analytics (such as what percentage of the auditions were for YAPs). Adding a drop-down list to a column ensures that your answers stay consistent.
To create a drop-down, first you need to make a list of what the choices are. You can do this anywhere that’s outside your table, but I prefer to make my list on another worksheet so it doesn’t clutter up the data I want to see. At the bottom of your window, you should see tabs for different “worksheets” in your “workbook” that are called, by default, Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. You should be working on Sheet1 now, so click on Sheet2 to add your drop-down lists. In fact, let’s double-click on the tab name and change it from “Sheet2” to “Drop-downs.”
Start your list anywhere on the worksheet. Again, I like to start in A1, but it really does not matter in this case. List your options vertically: in the first box (A1 in my case), type YAP; in A2, type Mainstage; in A3, type Competition; and in A4, type Grad School. You might also want to have an A5 called Other. Once all your options are entered, click-and-drag your mouse to select them. There’s a box in the upper-left corner above the workbook title that will now read something like A1. This is where the name for the range of cells you’ve selected goes, except that you haven’t named this range yet. Click in that box and type “AuditionTypes”. (No spaces allowed for named ranges!) Now if you click somewhere else and then select the same fields again, the name AuditionTypes will appear in that box.
Now return to your first sheet with your column headers on it (“Sheet1” if you haven’t changed the name). Click on the cell below Audition Type and then select Data and then Data Validation from the ribbon. (Microsoft calls that stripe of icons at the top of the window the “ribbon.”) In the Data Validation dialog box, go to the Allow drop-down menu and select List. Then click in the Source field and type “=AuditionTypes”. Finally, click OK. Now when you click in the cell under Audition Type, you’ll see a drop-down arrow that you can click to select a type from the list you made.
Before we move on, let’s restrict one more column. Audition Offered? is a yes or no question. Seems simple enough but, again, consistency is key. Are you going to type “Yes/No,” “yes/no,” “Y/N,” or “y/n”? In this case, we’ll use another list—but since it’s a simple one, we’ll take a shortcut.
Click in the cell below Audition Offered? and then go to Data Validation again. Select List like before, but then in the Source field, type your options directly, separated by a comma. I think typing “y” and “n” is fastest, so I’m going to type “y, n”. However, if you want to type “Yes, No” to make your table look prettier, that’s OK too. One more thing here: there’s really no need to use a drop-down to select y and n. They’re easier to just type. So I’m going to deselect the checkbox next to In-cell dropdown before I click OK.
Now when you click in that cell, you won’t see anything different, but if you try to type something other than “y” or “n”, you’ll get an error message.
Turn It Into a Table
Now that we have the options the way we want them, it’s time to make our table. This is something you could do earlier, but I like to wait to do it at this point because now all the rows I add to the table later will automatically have the settings from this starter row, like the drop-down lists.
Start by selecting both the row of column headers and the row below it. Then under Styles on the Home ribbon, click Format as Table. Now comes the fun part: selecting a design for your table. Don’t feel any pressure—this is easy to change later if you want to. After you select your style, a dialog box will confirm that you’ve selected the cells you meant to. Select the My table has headers checkbox and then click OK.
Use Your Spreadsheet
Now that your data is formatted and in a nice-looking table, you can go to work. Fill in your data and don’t worry about what order you make your entries in—you now have an easy way to sort at any time. Just click the drop-down arrow next to the column you want to sort by (such as Company) and select Sort A to Z or whatever the option you want for that column. You can also select filter options to display only the results you want, such as only the auditions for which the Response field is blank. There’s obviously much more you can do with this information, but that’s a subject for another day.
This is just one example of using Excel for your singing career. But even if you decide that tracking by using spreadsheets isn’t for you, you can always use the skills you learned here to get your next temp job!
