Since I first began researching preparedness I’ve been concatenating what I know into an Excel sheet to help refresh my mind when I need to remember what I’ve previously learnt. For example if I forget what ratio of Calcium Hypochlorite I need to add to water for the initial solution.
Each section seen above has a link you can click to jump to the section shown as well as subheadings when you get there to jump even further into the content you are looking for. An example being “Water > Acquiring Water”. The aim is to find any information you are looking for quickly and easily. Alternatively you could also use “Ctrl + F” to search for what you want if the wording is precise.
There are 11 columns of space of information, I chose this number because there are a lot of “10” row data fields and I usually add a description in the first column to give context about the row. There is also another 11 rows beyond the divider in the middle to allow for comments, discussion and answers which is used in the Entertainment section. Overall the column number goes to “AC” after which it’s then cut off to prevent unnecessary scrolling.
This document has slowly been growing over the past few months until now where it’s 10Mb. I carry this around on my phone at all times because you’ll never know when the information will come in handy.
As of today (2nd May 2018) there are 70 categories such as Water, Cooking, Barter, Foraging, Animal Identification, Homesteading, Gear, Fuel, Weapons, Medical and 60 more.
Each category has a percentage that it’s complete which I update as I fill in more information in that section. When every section is 100% the encyclopedia will be complete. I will however be disseminating the guide prior to completion as I will need assistance finishing it.
Up until now I’ve spent about 1573.25 hours compiling it which is calculated from the number of cells I have that contain information and using the assumption that each cell takes 1 minute to complete. Noting that that may be an overestimation I often come back to cells and edit the information and many of the cells take well over 1 minute to complete, so it averages out.
Unfortunately the document has been corrupted twice already in the past few months which is horrifying when it happens as I’ve spent so much time on this, but both times I’ve managed to recover it (or most of it). Therefore I now wish to blog my progress and upload parts of the guide so I always have an online backup to fall back on.
The first corruption I believe was due to it being saved incorrectly on my USB, which was fairly easily recovered by the built-in excel recoverer. After that terrifying moment I backed up the document 7 times as it was the only copy I had at the time. The second corruption I have no idea how it happened but when I tried to open it on my Windows 10 pc (As I usually edit it on a vista pc), it said it was unreadable and then proceeded to ERASE the file and ALL the 6 other backups I had on the USB. So now I’ve learnt my lesson to have off-USB backups as well. I had to use “Recuva” a brilliant program for recovering deleted and deep files from drives that are invisible to the eye.
After those panic attacks, I’m happy to say I now back them up online as well as on multiple PCs and USB’s, so I’d like to see it corrupt now. At most I can only lose one day’s worth of work.
Currently I’m working on the “Plant Identification” section which by far is the biggest with over 5,400 rows. I have recently added the name of every edible plant known on the planet and it’s scientific name. The next step is to find the information for each plant such as Physical Characteristics, Habitats, Known Hazards, Edible Parts, Medicinal Uses, Pictures and more. At this rate if I add 50 plants a day it would take 108 days to complete them all and it takes about 3 minutes to do a row. (That’s 270 hours to complete them all)
So that’s the simple introduction to TPE, if you wish to help add information to the article please let me know, although I’m not yet giving out the guide until it’s a little further along. I’m also unsure about the title of the guide, perhaps something without “The” at the start to use it more fluently in sentences.
