Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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By the time you read this update, I should be out of the country. After a lot of phone calls I managed to convince American Airlines to let me use my AAdvantage miles for a trip from LA to Europe, stopping off in each direction. On the way to Europe I'm in Boston for my college reunion (never mind which one), and on the way back I'm in Orlando for InfoComm.

Why do you care?

Well this was a complicated trip to plan and I decided to use several Office programs — along with my web resources — to organize it properly.

As you normally might, I began by doing some basic research at web travel sites to see how the airline portion might work. I had to coordinate my trip to London on American with interior European portions to my ultimate destinations: Prague and Split, Croatia.

I had some intermediate stopovers; besides London I needed a night in Miami to recover and get a car since Orlando could not be included in an international itinerary using AAdvantage miles by American Airlines. To see how the trip might work out, I mapped the whole thing out with All Day Events (leaving room for individual appointments) in MS Outlook.

Figure 968

Now I needed to actually begin reserving more flights, rooms and cars. I used Expedia and Hotwire for this, and received email confirmations. By clicking Save As in the message, and selecting the Outlook message format, I was able to collect my confirmations in a folder on my Desktop.

Figure 969

I also saved some web pages with confirmations or information about my hotels, as *.MHT files as I described in a previous update ("the Old MHT Trick"), saving me from lots of annoying subfolders to support HTML files.

Now I was able to begin my piece de resistance — an Excel master spreadsheet to budget my trip and keep track of what I had already done, and still needed to do.

First I listed my stops in chronological order:

Boston

London

Prague

Split

Prague

London

Miami

Orlando

I made a separate column for Hotel Costs, Other Costs and Hotel Nights, so that I could add these up separately using the AutoSum command after selecting the relevant cells.

I also got a Master Total by using a formula: =SUM(E2:E31)+D32 and highlighted the sum in bold. (I contemplated using a Conditional Formatting scenario to warn me if the total exceeded three grand, but decided it was overkill).

Figure 970

By keeping the hotel totals separate, and totaling up my number of nights, I was able to calculate and track the cost per night using web hotel specials with the formula =D32/F32 (Hotel Cost divided by Number of Nights.

Amazingly by booking early and paying for the rooms through sites like Hotwire I was able to keep my average rate below $80 per night, including European cities.

Figure 971

My last bit of effort entailed getting the information about each stopover into the spreadsheet, but copying and pasting reservation numbers, phone numbers and address into the main worksheet was unworkable. I considered workbooks with tabs for each stopover — but then I figured — why not hyperlink?

Since I had saved the Excel file in the same folder (Europe) as my email messages and web pages about each segment, I simply created a hyperlink from the event to the reservation file.

Figure 972

The word Hotel in each case is linked to the specific reservation file saved in the folder, which opens as text, email or web page when clicked.

This makes it a snap to pull up individual information for each stopover to refer to it, and print it again if necessary.

Combining this with the hard copies for each event by having the master folder on my laptop and a portable flash drive will give me three versions of my trip itinerary to refer to and will hopefully make my trip as efficient as possible.

The one thing the Trip Report spreadsheet did not calculate was extras from currency conversion or credit card use. This is not computer information — this comes from life experience. Any credit card purchase that is in a foreign currency charges a 2-3% conversion charge. Cash advances abroad can add another 3%. (A word to the wise — take travelers checks).

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