Sugar Turned On Me

A while back, I suggested using a spreadsheet to keep track of your diet and diabetes. As much access as the average American has to computers, keeping your blood sugar diary in an electronic format is convenient and makes it easier to search for individual dates, food items or blood sugar numbers.  I didn’t elaborate on what one might use to make a spreadsheet, so I thought I might offer a few places and mention other electronic options.

Excel, a Microsoft product, is an excellent spreadsheet application. Learning to use it, if you’re not already familiar, does take a little time. One you do get used to it,  it’s a very flexible, powerful tool.

If you’re not looking to pay for anything, then check out OpenOffice . It’s a free set of applications similar to Microsoft Office and has it’s own spreadsheet application. I’ve not used it, but it has gotten some thumbs up from the community at large.

If you’re not intrested in using an application at all, take a look at Google Documents . Google offers a number of online applications. The advantage of them is that they are always accessible online. The downside is that, well, they’re online. Don’t have internet access? Too bad.

So say you don’t want to pay for anything, don’t want to install anything and don’t want to use the internet. If you have a computer running Windows, you can use an application that comes as part of the operating system, Notepad. This is a text editor, not a spreadsheet, but it does have a cool function that will let you use it as a diary:

1. Open the application. It’s usually under the start menu> all programs > accessories.
2. On the first line, with nothing else typed out, put in .LOG and save the document. Typing it in upper case matters.
3. Open the saved document again. You’ll notice that it adds the date and time you opened it up.
4. Type what you want to type, save and close the document.
5. Each time you open it, it should add the time and date.

Now admittedly, you could take the extra ten seconds to type the time and date out by hand, but it’s still convenient.

If you’re using  a desktop application like Excel or Notepad and you want to carry your information with you, you can pick up a portable USB drive for as little as $5 at Target. These plug into your computer’s USB ports and act as a detachable hard drive. Even the smallest available capacity is enough to carry a lot of text.

I was using an Excel spreadsheet at first. I’m thinking about either using the Notepad version or perhaps going back and seeing what else I can make the Excel spreasheet do for me. Either way, it’s good to be able to make additional use of the tools available to keep watch on my diabetes.

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