The Cataloging & Rating Tea Thread :) (edited title)

you can revisit it later on. it took me a while to figure out that it was the best way to catalog my teas :)

I’m very happy with the mind mapping programs I use now.

Same.

Think most of us should admit we have a problem. I have a hyper addictive personality though. I’d rather be addicted to tea than other things.

addiction to something healthy cant be all that bad :)

Yappychappy- I’m the same way, but I figure tea can only be bad on my wallet

In times long past I averaged $30 a night on entertainment. My tea budget will never approach that.

30 a night? DANG

And thats spread out weekly and includes nights I didn’t do much.

The spreadsheet program of Google Docs seems to have most of the same functionality as Excel as well, and it’s free to boot. I personally use Excel and it’s perfect.

theres also Open Office.

You don’t need to retype it in excel either. It auto populates. AND you can summarize with pivot tables and make charts! pretty ones with plenty of colours :D

Colored pivot tables and charts are not pretty.
Source: I’m a pro statistician.

Hahaha, I totally agree that coloured pivot tables/charts, etc. aren’t pretty in the context of the real world, but I have fun with colours on charts for kicks/personal use. :) Bells and whistles are frowned upon in my research environment, sigh.

I rely on steepster for my rating storage. Although I will admit I just did a -10 scaling for 95% of the teas I have and that was quite annoying.

I use color coding all the time for both home and work. Work uses a lot of green/yellow/red for risk etc. so I try to limit the colors in the work stuff but go crazy at home.

Applying colors to words to imply some overall meaning isn’t the same as coloring pivot tables (: I certainly didn’t mean zOMG no coloring things red to denote negative!
I was really messing around anyway. Check my latest response in the steepster suggestions thread

lol at my old job, that was the highlight of my day. It wasn’t very interesting, as you can tell! I managed to make a few pretty ones, don’t tell my boss haha

glad that works for y’all :)

yappychappy – I hear you with the ratings stuff… I have a bad habit of trending towards rating things overly high (like, everything 80+!) that I correct every now and then, but it means some of my ratings are skewed upwards, and I really should go through and fix them…. but…. so much work!

I scaled most flavored teas down 10 except those that I really liked, which went down 5. I had some at 100 that clearly didn’t deserve it. Like oatmeal raisin cookie. Its amazing and a staple, but 100? no not so much.

I completely agree. I think my ‘100’ ratings are ok for me, but I know I have teas rated in the 80s and 90s that really shouldn’t be there, they should really be around 67-75 because I like them (smiley face) and would recommend them, but they’re not the epitome of awesome.

The more tea you drink, the more you realize a 75 is a good score.

I don’t think I ever realized why I had such a hard time scoring teas in the mid range on here until you articulated it like this. I guess I view most teas as “B” grade which is 80s, and below 70 is failing! I can’t help it though, I have spent too much time teaching college/professional students

You know, Donna – I think you’re absolutely right! Whereas in the school system, 50 is considered “fail” and 100 “perfect” (i.e., grades below 50 are all equally failures), the tea ratings scale is really more of a representation of the top half of that scale, so what I’d consider a tea fail would be 0 (50 on the school scale), so a 75 “tea rating” is like an 87.5% school mark, which honestly wouldn’t be acceptable to me ;) but is really quite a good mark! Thanks! The smiley faces do indicate this well, and they’re good reminders for me as to where I should be rating things, IF I don’t get all caught up in the numbers.