Recording your pub visits?

[Delboy20]

How do you all record your pub visits?
I am a bit old school and I have a pile of old diaries covering the last 15 years or so where I have noted all my new pub visits. It is a real pain when I am trying to remember which pubs I went in when I last visited a town years before!
My real problem is that I know nothing about spreadsheets but there must be an easy way to record my visits.
I'd like to transfer all my diaries onto something which I can easily look through to find the pub name, town, date etc but I am clueless!
Hope this makes some sort of sense.
Help me ......

[sheffield hatter]

I know nothing about spreadsheets but there must be an easy way to record my visits.

Spreadsheets are quite easy to get into if you're prepared to give it a go. But if you're looking for a physical way of maintaining a list that's easier to search than 15 years of diaries, how about a card index?

[Walty]

When I started ticking venues off at the start of 2018 (rather than just going to pubs and not noting where I had been) I used (and still do) the Notepad on my iPhone. One note for each month in each year and by date I record where, generally what I had to drink and any interesting features about the venue and the street name. Generally then I can search the notes to check if I have been somewhere previously (although I generally remember that) but it can be pretty tricky to find when if it is say the Red Lion on High St as the search feature isn’t very good and just finds the first instance one of the words in the note for that month! Also some months a v long in terms of notes and for some reason there must be a maximum size of text for the Notes search feature to work (so can miss visits recorded in the last couple of days of active months)!! Better than nothing I suppose.

However, when I discovered PG last year, I used there feature there on where you can record the date of last visit to a venue and so it took me a while late last year and early this year to go through area by area adding the date of last visit to each pub there in. Would have missed a few in infrequently visited areas but I have recorded all visits in Central and Greater London and commonly visited places I think.

Would love to have the feature where you can select to show date of last visit by region of an area though. For camper am in Cardiff this weekend and have some time to kill this evening whilst my wife has an appointment so wanted to tick off remaining unvisited pubs in the Roath area. I can only select to see date of last visit / not visited at the Cardiff area (about 230 venues) but when I click into Roath (about 10 pubs) I can’t similarly click to see date of last visit if each of those pubs and have to check by finding them in the full listing for the Cardiff area. Not a hard task I know, and I remember generally which I have been to and which I haven’t but I did go and have to look a couple of them up in the big list.

[rpadam]

How do you all record your pub visits?
Help me ......

I was halfway through responding on a different device when I suddenly realised what the time was and had to leg it down to the station to get the train for an essential pub research trip!

I will finish it off (noting what others might have advised in the meantime) and send when I get back

[rpadam]

How do you all record your pub visits?
I am a bit old school and I have a pile of old diaries covering the last 15 years or so where I have noted all my new pub visits. It is a real pain when I am trying to remember which pubs I went in when I last visited a town years before!
My real problem is that I know nothing about spreadsheets but there must be an easy way to record my visits.
I'd like to transfer all my diaries onto something which I can easily look through to find the pub name, town, date etc but I am clueless!
Hope this makes some sort of sense.
Help me ......

Yes, a spreadsheet (e.g. Microsoft Excel) is almost certainly the answer, but that needn't be complicated after you've taken the plunge!

In its simplest form, you just need a column for each attribute you want to record, e.g.

• Pub name
• Post town
• Locality
• Rating
• Owner
• Date of visit
• Description

That's just typing, but the key is to apply filters to all columns (which is a one-time action just requiring a couple of clicks, covered by the online help function).

This will help you get lists of whatever you want, for example:

• All pubs with the same name, e.g. Red Lion
• All pubs in the same post town (e.g. Dudley) or locality (e.g. Sedgeley)
• All pubs with the same rating(s), e.g. everything rated 8 or above
• All pubs run by the same owner, e.g. Wetherspoon or Black Country Ales
• All pubs visited on the same day, month or year
• Any combination of the above

To start off with, I would suggest just starting with ten or 20 pubs to experiment with and get things set up as you want before launching into the 15-year backlog!

You can also add any other columns you might want to filter on, e.g. micropubs, taprooms, closed pubs or whatever.

Another enhancement might be to make the pub name a link to take you directly to the Pubs Galore page, but start simple and add features as you go.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

[sheffield hatter]

In its simplest form, you just need a column for each attribute you want to record, e.g.

• Pub name
• Post town
• Locality
• Rating
• Owner
• Date of visit
• Description

That looks like a really good explanation. The only improvement I would suggest would be to have a column for the pub postcode. In the unlikely event (though it's happened to me!) of visiting a pub that you can't remember having visited before, this would help identify a potential duplicate (using the filter).

[Mobyduck]

In the unlikely event (though it's happened to me!) of visiting a pub that you can't remember having visited before,

And me! Also pubs I know I've visited but have no recollection of, usually last ones of a long crawl.

[rpadam]

In the unlikely event (though it's happened to me!) of visiting a pub that you can't remember having visited before, this would help identify a potential duplicate (using the filter).

Happened to me a few times too, but usually when the name has changed at some stage during the last XX years since my previous visit (although I've also been caught out by a postcode correction at least once).

[Delboy20]

Yes, a spreadsheet (e.g. Microsoft Excel) is almost certainly the answer, but that needn't be complicated after you've taken the plunge!

In its simplest form, you just need a column for each attribute you want to record, e.g.

• Pub name
• Post town
• Locality
• Rating
• Owner
• Date of visit
• Description

That's just typing, but the key is to apply filters to all columns (which is a one-time action just requiring a couple of clicks, covered by the online help function).

This will help you get lists of whatever you want, for example:

• All pubs with the same name, e.g. Red Lion
• All pubs in the same post town (e.g. Dudley) or locality (e.g. Sedgeley)
• All pubs with the same rating(s), e.g. everything rated 8 or above
• All pubs run by the same owner, e.g. Wetherspoon or Black Country Ales
• All pubs visited on the same day, month or year
• Any combination of the above

To start off with, I would suggest just starting with ten or 20 pubs to experiment with and get things set up as you want before launching into the 15-year backlog!

You can also add any other columns you might want to filter on, e.g. micropubs, taprooms, closed pubs or whatever.

Another enhancement might be to make the pub name a link to take you directly to the Pubs Galore page, but start simple and add features as you go.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

This is very daunting for me but I'm going to have a go!
Many thanks for taking the time to set out this response - I have taken your advice and started with some simple columns - Pub name, town, county, owner and date of visit.
I have entered about 20 from a couple of days out this year and I'll try out some filters next.

Quick question on dates. I know exactly when I have visited new pubs for the last 15 years but what about before that?

I want to eventually record all the pubs I have visited but have no idea of dates between 1987 - 2009. Any suggestions?

[trainman]

I was halfway through responding on a different device when I suddenly realised what the time was and had to leg it down to the station to get the train for an essential pub research trip!

Brilliant! Excellent prioritisation of life's essentials. Loved this comment.

Delboy, if you were to mention here the columns you may want in a spreadsheet, suggestions above but you may want to add first date visited, most recent visit, number of beers etc, then I'm sure one of us could knock up the template to send you and you can just rename it and add/overtype your own data...

Does your laptop have excel? Mine, painfully, does not, but I can still use it via office, albeit a bit of a workaround.