Background:
I saw some people complaining about how they missed the official NaNoWriMo writing tracker on BlueSky. I found this hilarious, as I had been so frustrated by the tracker, that I had created a spreedsheet of my own to track my progress, because it’s such a simple thing, and I’m an Engineer.
So I’m making my tracker public, here, as a .ods (Libre Office Spreedsheet; it will open in Excell and I believe Google Drive as well.
This sheet should be simple to use. The only cells you need to edit are A34 (starting word count), and the word count (Column B, cells B2-B31), and Days Left (D33). You can also set a different writing goal than 50,000 by editing the Target (Cell B35)
If you have words in your starting document, you can add them to the tracker at Starting Word Count, and then the sheet won’t count those words towards your 30 day goal. This makes it trivial to use the sheet to track a goal of adding words to an ongoing project without putting the new words in a separate document.
The sheet will automatically calculate words per day (Column C), and your Margin (Column F), which is just the difference from the words you’ve written and the average number of words you’d need to write per day to reach your goal. So if Margin is negative, you’re behind the pace, but if it’s positive your that far ahead.
The biggest issue I’ve found with the sheet, is for stuff like margin and words per day to calculate properly, the Wordcount (editable column B) needs to be equal to the previous days. This can be reset by formula-dragging the bottom, bordered cell up to cover all but the first day. That way, days where you haven’t entered data yet will track the day above them, and then Words Per Day will be properly calculated at zero. Alternatively, just download a new copy of the spreadsheet.
One thing I found myself looking at a lot was “how much more do I have to write?” This is what he bottom numbers are (Cells C33 and C34). The first is how many words you’ll have to write per day to hit the target, and the second is the total number of words. Assuming you have some zero-word days (I always did), there’s no elegant way to track how many days are left, so that’s a field you’ll have to edit manually (in cell D34).
There should be two charts, a bar chart, tracking Total Words per Day (that’s the column that ignores starting words in the document), and a second line chart looking at words per day.
In Excell, I could get these to be overlaid with a pace line, but Libre Office Calculator chart tools are more of a pain to work with, so I’ve not bothered.