Things That Make You Go Green

So as some of you may know, in order to save gas, I’ve been trying to drive less like I normally do, and more like my mom. It hasn’t been a rousing success so far and the gas mileage on my Civic seems to be going down, but the good news is that I’ve worked out a pretty cool and easy way to track your gas mileage on the go using Google Spreadsheets and your iPhone (or any other decent phone with a data connection and a browser). Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a new spreadsheet at Google Docs. (http://docs.google.com/)
2. Save it with a short title like “Gas Mileage”
3. Click on the “Form” tab, (see picture above) and click on “Create a form”
4. Click “Add a question” and add a question title for each of the major things you’d like to track. In my case, my question titles were: Mileage, Gallons Used, and Notes.
5. When you’re done, share the form to an email address your phone can access. 
6. Check your email from your phone. You should have received an email from Google Docs inviting you to fill out the form you just created. Don’t do it yet. Instead, there should be something like this in the mail: “If you have trouble viewing or submitting this form, you can fill it out online:http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pzwSTILvb5uMiZJHoFEiiVg&email=true
7. Click on that spreadsheet link, and when it opens in your phone’s browser, bookmark it
8. Next time you fill up your gas, pull out your phone, and go to that bookmark. Fill out your odometer reading and miles used, and hit submit. 

That’s it! Every time you hit submit your miles and gallons used will be uploaded to the spreadsheet you just created! Its a super easy way to keep track of your mileage. Take a look at my spreadsheet here. One caveat is that if you create the form, you can add additional columns for calculations (such as figuring out the gas mileage) but you can’t paste those formulas down - it interferes with the way the form fills out, so you need to paste down the calculation each time. But other than that, it works great! You can even add charts, as you can see in mine.