Spreadsheets 101 for True Beginners: How to Calculate Memorial Weight

You are back, and diving deeper into spreadsheets! Being a true beginner at spreadsheets may seem overwhelming, but these skills will rock your world! And, speaking of rocks, today we are going to learn how to calculate a memorial’s weight in a spreadsheet.

Calculating Square Footage

In this previous post we started creating a spreadsheet to help us calculate the square footage of some common flat markers. We are going to build on that spreadsheet and, at the end of this series, you will have a spreadsheet you can use in your monument business.

So, I completed the spreadsheet we started and this is what it looks like.

You will recall, we formulated column I to automatically calculate the square footage of flat grass markers and I threw two ledgers in there for fun.

But, there is a problem with the results listed in Column I- there are WAY too many numbers after the decimal! So, let’s fix that!

Reduce the Decimals

We are going to move our cursor to the column I box and click on it. When you click on it, the entire column will turn gray, meaning you have selected it.

Then, you will right-click on your mouse and a box will populate. That box will have several options at the top, including an option for “Number”. If that isn’t already selected, you will need to click on it.

Now, see where it says “Category” and it lists General, Number, Currency, etc? There you want to click on “Number”. By doing this, you are telling the program that you want the data in that particular row to be in number format. Then, over to the right it will ask you how many decimal places you want your data to have.

In the monument world, I tend to see square foot figures have two decimal place. So I am going to leave the 2 and click “OK”. Isn’t the result beautiful?!

If you require more decimal places, you would simply type in the number of places you need.

Calculate the Weight

Weight of a stone is incredibly important in the monument world. Why? Because your freight costs are based on it.

But calculating weight doesn’t have to be a long, calculator-intensive process. Instead, we can formulate our spreadsheet to calculate it for us.

But, before we input the formula into the spreadsheet, we first need to make sure we know the formula.

To calculate the weight, we need to first calculate the stone’s volume, or cubic meter. To do that, we take the stone’s length x width x height in inches and then divide it by 61024 (the number of square inches in a cubic meter).

Next we will scroll over in the spreadsheet to cell J1 and type in CBM.

Then we will enter our formula in cell C2. It should look like this:

=(D2+F2+H2)/61024

Click enter, and you will have calculated the CBM for your first piece!

But….what if your cell shows 0.00?? That isn’t an answer!

Well, it is simply an issue of decimal places. We covered how to deal with decimal places earlier in this post. Go back up and review it if you don’t recall the steps.

Isn’t the result nice?!

Now we are going to copy and past the formula in the rest of the cells in column J. You will recall how to do that my re-visiting this previous post.

Oh, it is looking so pretty!!

Next we will make a heading for Weight.

To calculate the weight we simply take the CBM that we just calculated and multiply it by 3060 and by 2.2. So the formula will look like this:

=J2x3060x2.2

Now, simply copy and paste your formula into the remaining cells in column K, and you have quickly calculated the estimated weight of each piece!

Comparing Freight Rates

Getting competitive freight rates is important, right? In my next post we are going to continue with this practice spreadsheet and learn how to easily and quickly use our spreadsheet to calculate and compare freight rates. Click here to read it.

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