Are you Planning to Write Your Memoirs ? If so, You need to keep a Diary...

Increasing numbers of our 'celebs' nowadays are publishing their memoirs, sometimes quite early on in their careers. 

Perhaps the most noteworthy of these recently was Prince Harry, whose book 'Spare' quickly reached the best seller list and is still going strong. While memoir writing isn't for all of us, anyone contemplating doing this at some stage in their lives needs to ensure they keep a personal diary on a regular basis. This ensures that they have an accurate and detailed record of their lives to call upon when compiling 'The Book'. 

Keeping a diary does of course require quite a bit of self-discipline, but has many benefits apart from just generating a life record and is therefore well worth the effort. A couple of lines of text taking maybe 5 minutes a day will usually suffice to cover the key events for that day. It will also help cement our memories and enable us to recap usefully on what we have (or haven't !) done that day.

Many of us may well have been keeping paper diaries since our teens, and already have a sizeable repository of unique personal history stored in this form. The problem with this format, though is.....'searchability'. 

I have kept diaries since my youth and many's the time I've wanted to find out when an event occurred and retrieve some of the details. The particular record involved  has often taken hours to locate, or even not emerged at all. Around 2010, by which time home pcs had firmly established themselves in most people's homes, I decided that 'enough was enough' and decided to go paperless. 

Being already reasonably competent with the use of MS Excel by that time, and finding nothing suitable in the way of software for my purposes 'off the shelf', I decided to develop my own solution to the problem. The software I came up with enabled me to dispense with the yearly paper diaries and has served me well since then. It has also evolved over the years, with a number of useful extras added. It also allowed much greater portability, and avoided the need to cart paper diaries around Europe when on my business/holiday travels.

So successful has this strategy been for capturing current day to day events and retrieving them easily later on, that I decided to put some effort into digitising some of my old paper diaries pre-2010. 

While doing this recently (which proved to be a fascinating experience in 'virtual time travel', and one which brought many memories flooding back), I thought it might be of interest to produce a generalised version of the diary capture system and offer it to others for downloading via my website.

You can now download and try out a blank version of this for yourselves – just go to the website's download page  and follow the prompts to download the Excel file ‘Diary.xlsm’. The file is unrestricted and you're welcome to use and/or modify it to suit your own needs.

Here are the main features:

*Provides year by year daily free text ‘slots’ for your diary entries – 1 worksheet per calendar year. No character limit for individual entries but the layout works best with a notional 'tweet size' limit of ca 300 characters. Day, date and day/week of year are pre-installed in separate columns for each calendar date.

*You can hyperlink memorable photo and video collections or any other data to a specific date.

*Fully searchable – performs a whole workbook global search or search within each worksheet column using filters.

*Extra date- & time-related utilities are provided including:

Full Year Planner generator for any year – Prints on a single A4 sheet if hard copy required;

Delivery date calculator which takes into account non-working days & bank holidays;

Separate reminder sheet for those notable dates in the future you really don’t want to forget.

Notable events generator for each calendar year (1971-2040).

*Diary is currently pre-configured for years between 2023 and 2036 – easily expandable if required.

*Minimal drive space required – maximum 2-3 MB when full – the whole diary can easily be accommodated on a  low-capacity USB stick for increased portability & backup purposes.

*Adaptable for any date-related application (e.g. storing a searchable independent record of your own tweets or posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., etc).

*Runs under MS Excel (requires macros to be enabled to run utility programs; macros are not required to enter or view data).

*Principally designed to run on Windows or Mac pcs with MS Excel installed, but could be used on tablets or phones with suitable Office software emulators (e.g. Android/Ios app ‘WPS Office’).

The Excel file is stand-alone and requires no internet or mobile phone network connection

As for any Excel file, the workbook can be passworded to prevent unauthorised access (Don't forget your password, though !)

As an electronic record, it can be easily backed up - you can't do this with paper diaries, which are unfortunately far too easy to lose track of during house moves, job changes and all the other upheavals we go through during our lives.

....And no more worries about not being able to read your own handwriting years after the event !...

Why not try it and see how you get on ?…..you'll save time, handwriting effort.....and the perennial expense of all those annual paper diaries / wall planners. Please note that the button-driven modules will only run if you allow macros in your Excel settings. 

If you have existing paper diaries from way back, and have the time, you could set up a separate version of the workbook as a 'past events tracker' as I did. I've found that doing this for my own diaries has produced a searchable index which I can use to focus on key events when looking back at the originals. As discussed, the process of compiling the index also brings those memories flooding back....  

Suggestions for any additions/revisions to the workbook welcome.

Viv 

Revised 18/10/23