Overland trip planner
Francois Visagie
Hi All,
With the high park fees in neighbouring countries it became a juggling act of available leave and budget against the number of nights at each place, while keeping track of all the other expenses. That became too complicated for me, especially with all the various currencies that you need to work out and take along, so I made a spreadsheet.
Here it is in case anyone else finds it useful. Enter your budget and other data into the white blocks, play around with your itinerary and stop-overs a bit and hopefully something emerges that you can work with ;-). At the bottom there’s a summary of how much of each currency is needed for each kind of expense, along with totals for each currency.
It’s preferable to use either true GPS kilometres or odo kilometres through-out. My car’s odo is out by more than 6%... Since most people do their trip planning for the GPS these days it’s probably easiest to just convert your car’s fuel consumption from odo km to GPS km and then use GPS distances in the trip planner.
I’m no Excel boff so if someone comes up with improvements, please share them here. In Excel 97-2003 format that will work on my trip computer, please! J
Kind regards,
Francois
Heine De Villiers
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Alan Calenborne
On Oct 22, 5:00 pm, "Francois Visagie" <fvisa...@za.spescom.com>
wrote:
> 84KViewDownload
Martin Solms
Thanks for creating it!
On Oct 23, 2:00 am, "Francois Visagie" <fvisa...@za.spescom.com>
wrote:
> 84KViewDownload
Michael Spencer-Wilson
Martin Solms
One frustration I have with all planning tools was the time consuming effort involved in calculating distances between two cities and adding to a log.
A quick Google revealed the answer... a clever chap has created a spreadsheet which uses Google Maps to calculate the most direct route between two addresses. And it can add to a log!
See my summary here: http://overland-live.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/route-planning-tool.html
and the original website here: http://winfred.vankuijk.net/2010/12/calculate-distance-in-google-spreadsheet/
Now all I need is to automate it between Francois' spreadsheet and the Google Docs version.
Have a play and let me know if you think its useful for quickly pulling an itinerary together.
Cheers
Martin
Francois Visagie
Martin, that’s very clever! I’ll definitely look into that when planning our next trip.
What’s worked for me so far is to plan my itinerary in MapSource then paste that into Excel. I.e.:
Press Ctrl-C:
Press Ctrl-V:
Now Find-and-Replace “ km” with “” so Excel can make sums:
Cheers,
Francois
PS. Perhaps some clever person can also automate this with Visual Basic ;-).
Francois Visagie
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A.H. (Eric) Sommer
>> calculating distances between two cities and adding to a log.
But the fun is in the planning!! J
That is a cool little spreadsheet and it’s pretty good. But it lacks the complete overview of your trip which MapSource/Basecamp can give you.
It also has issues when you put in a co-ordinate – it wrongly assumes you are stupid and moves your location to a major intersection or road it deems as correct (Google Maps ‘feature’)
I personally use MapSource extensively when planning distances etc.
I start by putting in the destinations. I name them numerically with description so like “01 – Dec 1 – Kromdraai”, “02 – Dec 2 – Craighall”, etc.
Then add in the “must sees” – also named with a numbered system but with a letter added – so “01a – N14”, “01b – Northcliff”, etc.
and then add in the “I want to go via” points. Same scheme for naming.
Then, create routes – named numerically with dates and destinations which connect those together.
One per day. Alternates done seperately.
You end up with something like this which gives you fairly accurate distance calcs for fuel purposes, and time calcs as well.
Export to Txt file, delete the gumph and you be done.
With the use of some colouring you get a pretty good overview map!
A.H. (Eric) Sommer
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