I decided to take a bit of this long weekend to prep for yet another overseas trip (this time to Sydney, which I really like!).

Digging into my Travel (real-space, not electronic) folder, I found a plethora of Australian bills and coins from my last trip, along with a ton of other bills and coins from nine other countries.  Eeep!  After sorting them all out, then I wondered:  how much is all of this worth?

$368.89 as it turns out.  Nice! (especially if I can find a local bank to actually change the money with little fees and decent rates, but that’s another issue).

Then I began thinking… hmm… if I prettied this spreadsheet I made and generalized it a bit, it might be useful to other folks, too!  So here it is:

As you’ve probably noticed, that sheet—while actually reflecting my newfound wealth AND updated in near-real-time—is read-only for you.  Bummer.  But fear not!  You can load the full document here, select FILE, then COPY, and voila!  You now have your own neato spreadsheet.  And by the way… you only need to change the stuff highlighted in yellow; the rest should be automatically computed for you.

A couple things I found fascinating in building this sheet:

• GoogleLookup flawlessly looked up the currency code from the countries specified!  Formula:  =googlelookup(A1,“currency code”) (A*=each country name).  Took a little experimenting for me to figure out the right search phrase
• And then there’s the neato Google Currency Conversion lookup thing.  Formula: =GoogleFinance(CURRENCY:CUR1CUR2) where CUR1 is the original currency and CUR2 is the currency you are converting to.  Thanks to a helpful comment on Friendfeed from Daniel Dulitz, I realized I could use CONCATENATE to make this more generalizable / non-hard-coded for both currency values.

Hope you find this useful, or at least interesting

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