Often whilst I am here in Jerusalem, I need to convert money from one type to another.  Items sold for large figures like property here in Israel often get listed in US Dollars.  If you haggle over something in an Arab market, if he knows you are foreign he will give you a price for a more expensive item in Dollars also.   I have bought parts to fix volunteers laptops every now and then and so I often need to give them prices in UK Pounds, Shekels, Dollars, Euros or South African Rand, depending where I source a part for and what currency they are most familiar in.

I often use a popular site called www.xe.net to convert things, when using Shekels you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and select “more currencies..”  this means this can be a bit slow and fiddly for working out conversions for small countries like Israel with their own indigenous monetary system.

In the last year or so I have started using Google Documents more and more, doing some work with traditional tools like Microsoft’s venerable Word and Excel is fine, (apart from a revamped and unfamiliar icon system on Office 2007 which befuddles a lot of users)  but rather than make a file and email it or have to copy it onto a USB stick to given to someone say, outside of my work, instead Google documents has files conveniently on the web and can be fetched from ANY computer be it a Windows XP, Vista, 7, Mac or Linux, or some kind of mobile device that has live connection to the internet, and set if you want just yourself, a selected group or the whole world to just read or have read and write access.

I looked around and couldn’t find something that shows currency conversion in a simple table format I wanted, so I made this one.  Google Documents spreadsheet has an ability to pick live figures of current set of exchange rates, so I decided this would be a good tool for the job.

Please note, I did my best to check the formulas of each cell are correct, feel free to use for any purpose you want but don’t use this for anything too critical.

At the moment this spreadsheet is available for anyone to read or edit, its possible it could get ‘vandalised’ so I have a second protected copy if that happens if it gets interfered with, I need to figure out the sharing rights to let people publicly use this without changing anything

If I could only get text to wrap over multiple cells properly… 🙂

Go to this Google spreadsheet here:- https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtYywUr33gtSdDFGMWpkRm5VZm15Y0RKdEpscmFyMlE&hl=en

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As a IT professional who is volunteering for a charity in Israel I enjoy creating solutions using technology to make things easier or save money or time, if you find this useful or just want to offer me a tip, feel free to donate the price of a beer or a coffee, using a Paypal account click here. Thank you!!

– NB correction, my blogging host wont let me put a link to Paypal here, so if you feel inclined, just send an amount of your choice to jp.hayward AT gmail.com, thanks!