I haven't seen a good and simple program or spreadsheet since the DOS days. I used one for my shop many years ago to service the equipment, anytime I could print out all work tickets for each item requiring service. Today it appears that we use computers for entertainment only.
How do you Keep track of maintenance and repairs.
- Thread starter woodman55
- Start date
Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
I don't trust the marker thing. I have heard of guys doing oil changes with nothing more that brake clean, a rag, and a black marker. Think auctions.
I don't think there's any "best" way keep logs. Just do whatever works for you, and you can always change the layout if it's not working for you.
I have 20 years of mpg data for the '98 Jeep TJ so if you want to know what a gallon of gas cost on Oahu between 2001 and 2014 I have that data.
For example, on June 7th, 2001 it was $1.92 for a gallon of 87 at a Unocal gas station in Aiea.This is how I keep track of information for a particular vehicle. I'm a bit of a spreadsheet fanatic to be honest. I add tabs for different categories and will insert images into a tab if helpful.
McMXI is definitely the king of Excel, well done sir! I keep it much simpler and the only more complex sheets I have built was when I was designing a high power amplifier for my ham radio setup.
Attached is a screen capture of the simple spreadsheet I use, the forum won't allow Excel file attachment. In the garage where the Kubota lives, I also keep a folder of scans from the manual page of the grease points and a couple of other often used page scans to keep the original manual clean and grease free. For in-depth reading, I use PDF manual copies on the computer and because I do a lot of work with documents I have a second monitor that rotates 90 degrees for page orientation which makes document reading much nicer.
Hint: although most Kubota manuals are pretty short, if you are often reading long documents on a Windows based system, then take a look at the Sumatra PDF reader (it is free). For big files it is MUCH faster and far more agile than using Adobe or Foxit which were my primary PDF readers for many years. I do most of my work on a HP Z series dual CPU workstation with 256 GB of memory per CPU and dual Nvidia workstation graphics cards with all documents running on very fast SS drives however scrolling through a very large (several hundred page document with graphics) using either Adobe or Foxit often resulted in frustrating pauses while it was rendering but with Sumatra it is like fast flipping pages in a book.
I have some expensive software loaded but my two favorite apps are Sumatra for PDF and irFanview for graphics (it will display pretty much any graphics format). Both work incredibly well, are very fast, and are free (think polar opposite of Windows
)
Rodger
Attached is a screen capture of the simple spreadsheet I use, the forum won't allow Excel file attachment. In the garage where the Kubota lives, I also keep a folder of scans from the manual page of the grease points and a couple of other often used page scans to keep the original manual clean and grease free. For in-depth reading, I use PDF manual copies on the computer and because I do a lot of work with documents I have a second monitor that rotates 90 degrees for page orientation which makes document reading much nicer.
Hint: although most Kubota manuals are pretty short, if you are often reading long documents on a Windows based system, then take a look at the Sumatra PDF reader (it is free). For big files it is MUCH faster and far more agile than using Adobe or Foxit which were my primary PDF readers for many years. I do most of my work on a HP Z series dual CPU workstation with 256 GB of memory per CPU and dual Nvidia workstation graphics cards with all documents running on very fast SS drives however scrolling through a very large (several hundred page document with graphics) using either Adobe or Foxit often resulted in frustrating pauses while it was rendering but with Sumatra it is like fast flipping pages in a book.
I have some expensive software loaded but my two favorite apps are Sumatra for PDF and irFanview for graphics (it will display pretty much any graphics format). Both work incredibly well, are very fast, and are free (think polar opposite of Windows
)Rodger