Creating a gear spreadsheet does not need to be suggestive of OCD, of course (though the blank weight spots still sort of bug me), but let me tell you it'll save a ton of time and energy if you download someone else's as your starting point. In fact, if you like this one you can go ahead and download it for yourself. I even made a copy where our own info is deleted (but it'll still add up weights for you!). Note that in the blank copy I put the units for weight in ounces--I did ours in pounds and it was a huge unnecessary pain since nearly every site lists weights in ounces.
Here are some strategies I used within this spreadsheet to make it less of a list and more of a planning tool:
- Color-Coding His/Hers: When I was hunting around online in 2010, I couldn't find any gear lists made for two people. Most were either planning a solo hike or, even if hiking as a couple, kept their lists separate (and often in different formats). But I wanted a format where we could hypothetically shift gear from one of our packs to the other to help decide who should carry what. To make his vs. hers vs. shared gear as obvious as possible, I filled Andy's gear with an orange background, mine with red/pink, and shared gear as blue. Then I typed the weight in under the column of whoever would be carrying that item (we moved these around a lot before and during the hike).
- Yellow Highlight for 'To Do': We continued to change/remove/add gear and fill in weights up until a few weeks before starting our Appalachian Trail hike (for which this was originally made) and going back to about a year and a half before (when I first downloaded another hiker's spreadsheet). I highlighted any gear we needed to get, weights we needed to find or measure, or items we needed to reconsider in some way (i.e. Do we need this?/Can we alter this in some way to make it lighter?).
- Costs: For the first year or so of planning, the spreadsheet included another column showing how much we paid for each item. In the beginning, when I had almost no gear and was working out budget, the cost column felt really useful. But at some point, for reasons I can't fully remember, I deleted it.
- Hyperlinks: To be honest, I'm not sure if I would have originally done this just for personal, non-blogging use, but most of the 'Items' column is filled with hyperlinks for each gear item (and most of those are to pages on REI's site). But it was actually really useful--since we were (and are) continually revising gear, the hyperlinks make it really easy to look back at the specs and reviews for each item.
Another column I've seen in other people's spreadsheets allows you to basically turn rows on and off. So if you're going on a week-long summer hike and know you won't need your down coat or long underwear, you can turn that column 'off' so that the weights of those items don't factor into the total. Which saves making a new spreadsheet for each hike. However... I'm not Xcel-savvy enough (or maybe patient enough?) to figure that one out yet!
On a similar technical-issue-note, blogger doesn't currently allow file users to post downloadable files so I whipped up a Google Site where we can post files for you. Right now there are two files there:
- Appalachian Trail Packing List: Our gear spreadsheet pre-Appalachian Trail hike
- Gear Planning List Template: Same spreadsheet as above, but with our info removed
Here's the site:
If you run into any issues with the file or have questions, enter a comment below and we'll do our best to help you out!
If you run into any issues with the file or have questions, enter a comment below and we'll do our best to help you out!
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