Introversion / Extraversion Assessment from Scientific American on Excel

March 13, 2016March 13, 2016Digital Citizen Leave a comment

On June 9th, 2014, the Scientific American blog Beautiful Minds had a rather in-depth article called Will the Real Introverts Please Stand Up? about what introversion really meant (and extraversion as the opposite). The term is still highly misunderstood, whether from generic social definitions, or more precise and complex definitions through the works of Myers-Briggs and others following.

In the Beautiful Minds article, they had a 20 question quiz written out. Some score adjustments were then required after you answered, followed by averaging your newly adjusted scores, and averaging two halves of your score if you wanted more information. In this post with an Excel spreadsheet attachment below, I have made this test a lot easier to take. You just answer the questions and flip through the process to see your results! There is a minor summary of your results, but you’d then go back to the original article linked above for the full details.

Continue reading →

Free 12 Month Advanced Finances Tracking and Analysis Spreadsheet

January 12, 2012December 30, 2016Digital Citizen 2 Comments

If you’ve ever aspired to try to track your finances to monitor and/or analyze your finances, this Excel spreadsheet may be the easiest and most self-motivating way you’ve yet seen! I haven’t seen any bank’s free or paid online financial tracking system give you this much information about your immediate financial status, nor as quickly. With that constant immediate feedback as you enter each new piece of data, don’t be surprised if you find yourself constantly setting your own financial targets to hit, either!

Continue reading →

Free Personality Assessments Based on Works of Jung, Myers, Briggs and Keirsey

February 20, 2011March 13, 2016Digital Citizen 194 Comments

March 2016 Update

I have added a separate, but very detailed introversion / extraversion assessment from Scientific American magazine. This is the most confusing and misunderstood dimension of the four in the personality assessment below so you might want to try this Scientific American assessment to better understand yourself, and/or the concept of introversion / extraversion, itself, and possibly others with that better understanding.

January 2016 update

The personality assessment here is now available as a free iOS app in the iTunes App Store! (my version is an Excel spreadsheet that works like software)

Thank you very much to Shawn Seymour, a student at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who wrote the app for free and made it available for free! Please check out his other work on his site!

———————————-

Get a free, complete personality assessment via the personality typing system created by Carl Jung, popularized by personality assessments as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®)* and Keirsey Temperament Sorter® (KTS®). This assessment is neither the MBTI® nor the KTS® (both paid services), though it has the same objective to identify your personality type in Jung’s personality typing system. The questions are just slightly different from the KTS® to extract the most accurate answers from users so you can get the truest results for yourself.

Why is method so important?

All the personality assessments mentioned above rely on how honestly you answer questions about yourself. They are only as good as you can be honest about yourself. Unfortunately, being honest about ourselves is something we are all challenged with to some extent in life. We all have biased self-perception, misconception or ignorance of our nature, or inconsistent understandings of what it means to be something. To overcome that, the questions in the assessment here ask about common real life situations so people can recall how they reacted rather than theorizing how they would react. What people say and do can often be very different! Cultural biases, obscure expressions, words with stigmas or noble connotations, and the like, have also been minimized.

Why do this assessment or do it again?

Ultimately, you’d do this assessment to get an objective view of your personality, what you are generally like in life and how you interact with others of differing personalities. The assessment cover situations at work and play, in various types of relationships and general life, and interactions with all other personality types in Jung’s system.

A side reason, possibly funner and more practical reason, is to see how you compare with anyone else who has taken a version of this, MBTI® or KTS®… or can be persuaded to take one by you. You can even compare yourself to famous people and fictional characters who might have never taken the assessment! Jung’s personality typing system is actually a theory so experts have been able to type people who have never taken the assessments based on their known actions (not words).

If you’ve done MBTI® or KTS® some years before, you might want to try “it” again as people change over time. This is truer if they have lived through life changing events like marriage, children, trauma or otherwise.

Downloads for the personality assessment tool

There are two Excel files for download here, in which you can answer the questions to get your personality type identified and assessed. One file is a modified KTS® assessment with the “best” questions, in my opinion, from KTS® versions I and II. The other is the same assessment with very basic English or “plain language” for people not completely fluent in English. Theoretically, you should get the same result doing either assessment.

Click here to download the Free Personality Assessment (Excel file)

Based on the best Jungian personality assessment tool available, in my opinion, developed by David Keirsey in his classic books Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II.
Version here is a “best of” KTS® versions I and II, using questions I thought would elicit most honest answers from most users. KTS-II® is used by the KTS site.
Questions ask about real life situations, not abstract concepts like preferred words.
Does not ask for absolute answers, but rather preferences.
Has been extensively used around the world. Claims to be most popular personality assessment in the world and Web traffic seems to indicate that, but MBTI® is probably most well-known from its longer history (close to 50 years).
Has flaws of challenging language, cultural bias, references and expressions which may be challenging to those not fluent in English or have low literacy.

Click here to download the Free Plain Language Personality Assessment (Excel file)

Mostly uses questions from the “best of” Modified KTS® version above, for the reasons that make it excellent.
Language is simplified so those for whom English is a foreign language, or those with low grade reading levels, can do the assessment and do it accurately. This is actually an excellent ESL or EFL class exercise!
Idioms or expressions are minimized.
Terms with cultural bias, like noble or stigmatized words, are eliminated.

: Fig 1 – Personality Assessment Question Form

: Fig 2 – The Results Tab to get your Results

: Fig 3 – Personality Assessment Results Sample

Doing the Personality Assessment (Fig 1)

Please refer to Figure 1 above.

There are 74 multiple choice questions to the test.
Just put A or B in the boxes beside each question.
You can’t select any cells besides those so no worries about messing up the file.
If you put anything besides A or B, the file will tell you to do otherwise.

Getting your Results Summary (Fig 2)

After you have entered an acceptable answer for all 74 questions, click on the RESULTS tab near the bottom left of the window to get your results.

The file tabulates your scores so there are no mistakes, and gives you a summary as shown above.

Click Print and it will print out all on one page automatically, if you want a print out.

Your Results Summary and Full Assessment (Fig 3)

Your results summary is just a brief part of your full assessment. There are multiple PDF files available with tens of pages of content for you to consider if you so wish.

Please click here to download files specific for your personality type results.

* MBTI and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are trademarks or registered trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc., in the United States and other countries.

Free Advanced Year Long Excel Running Log

January 5, 2011January 2, 2015Digital Citizen 34 Comments

Jan 2 2015 update

Everything below from the original post still applies. The link immediately below is for a MS Excel 2010 version so you don’t have to put up with “compatibility issues” of the old log. I hope you’ll like it. The MS Excel 97-2003 version is far below if you’re still using that version of Excel.

Blank Run Log Excel 2010 version

————————————————————————-

This is a much updated version of the year long Excel spreadsheet running log I had posted two years ago. You may want to refer to that post for some instructions. Thank you to all of you who had downloaded it, used it, suggested improvements and recommended it to others. If you liked that log, I think you’ll love this one! This new log has some great features I think you’ll love like a spot for your training plan next to what you did. While the focus is on running, there is room for other exercises and things you might want to track, like sleep, injuries, supplements, heart rate averages and maximums, etc. There is a race predictor using Jack Daniels’ running formula, with a short, simplified, but effective and practical explanation on how to use it. There is a calculator to determine any of time, distance or pace you need to run if you know 2 of the 3 variables. There is also a routes table to help calculate routes you take that are not your normal ones, but piece together bits of various routes you have ran. There is no new “summary” feature where what you input is number crunched, but that was because I didn’t perceive the need for any. Otherwise, most cells you shouldn’t touch are still locked up, but you have the ability to manipulate some partially for your use, like if you write a long comment one day and want to show it all rather than have some of it hidden away. As you use this spreadsheet, change the view size if the info is too small for your comfort. It can be at least twice as large. Don’t strain your eyes over using this or feel like you have to put on glasses to use it. You’ll use it less frequently for every little annoyance like this. The best way to see all this is to jump in so here goes! There are a lot of features to this log so don’t be intimidated by all the description. You need very little instruction to start and the rest should be pretty intuitive once you get going. Please click here to download the Advanced Excel Running Log by Minh Tan, 2011 version 2 (2.1 MB) The file is MS Excel 2003 version for greater compatibility for people. If you use a version later than this, please do a Save As and choose the latest version so you won’t get the “compatibility” pop-up each time you close the file. Continue reading →

Free Excel Running Log

January 3, 2009March 18, 2011Digital Citizen 48 Comments

There is an advanced and updated version of this log now (please click here to go to it).

If your friend had told you about this log, please tell them of the update in case they had not downloaded the 2011 update.

I keep this post up for those who had used this and found it sufficient for their needs and don’t want to deal with changes. Thank you.

This is an Excel spreadsheet running log I created, used and have improved for 10 years, which I would like to share with you.

Blank Run Log, by Minh Tan (1.5MB Excel file, updated Sep 16 2009)

I think it is fairly easy to learn and use, after 10 years of finessing out anything that still really annoys me. Instructions are included and cells you should not touch are locked to help avoid unintentional formula deletions and make it more user-friendly. It handles two runs per day and four extra types of workouts, plus up to 10 interval spaces for any workout so unless you train more than that (and I do know people that do!), this should suffice.

This spreadsheet does not have interfaces with new GPS and Heart Rate Monitors. I’m still training old skool on a 1998 Polar HRM.

I only regret to say I will not be providing technical support for this, unless you know me and can talk to me about it directly. I am sharing it out of good will and would like to minimize efforts beyond that. However, I welcome all feedback and suggestions. If I can do anything about it, I will to upgrade the file. That is why the date is beside the download. Otherwise, you can customize it further for yourself by adding your own worksheets and features within the file to suit your needs.

If you like it or want to show this post to your friends, you can either email the link or click on one of the social bookmarking tools in the bar below (for my less Net savvy friends). Thank you.

More about the Excel Running Log

The spreadsheet log requests a fair bit of data, of which you can decide how much or how little you want to enter. That, will in turn influence how much the log will be able to feed back to you about your training. It’s only as good as you are at keeping your own data, basically.

Detailed instructions are supplied on the worksheet you open the downloaded file to, but in the future, it should open to whatever page you closed and saved the file on. Instructions are probably only needed for your set-up and first few time you use it. It should become routine fairly quickly once you get the gist of it.

Among the data the log requests are time, distance (miles or km and you can change it for each entry), shoes worn to monitor your shoe mileage, etc. With some of this data, it does calculations, like pace given time and distance. With other data, it just gives you space to keep like comments, temperature (useful if you keep track of what you wore in your comments, for example), non-running workouts, your intervals that are not automatically comparable from time to time since intervals and workouts may change, and so on. An example of a filled out week is below (Pic #1).

Please use “k” for kilometre or “m” for miles under column E of “Distance”, to tell the spreadsheet what unit your number entered was in for the distance ran”.

Beyond the workout data and calculations, it also provides a summary chart with totals and averages of all sorts (Pic #2).

There are also graphic displays of this information for the visual types, as well as a more integrated look at your training (Pics #3 – #7).

Is that enough information for you? 🙂

I hope you enjoy it. All feedback are welcomed as if I can do anything about it, I will and update the file here accordingly. I hope you will find this of value. Thank you!