Tracking your blood test results and much more

[AussieNeil]

Way back in 2002, Chaya Venkat of CLLTopics/Updates fame, kindly provided an Excel workbook template to enable patients to track changes in their blood test results and monitor their health journey with CLL. That workbook was last updated in July 2007. With the support of other HealthUnlocked members, in August 2015 a major update was released which supports international use, fixes some charting bugs, includes additional blood tests (including some commonly used predictive tests) along with some wellness checks.

The updated workbook is comprised of the following spreadsheets or 'Tabs':

Read_Me – What you are reading now

CBC_CBE – Complete Blood Count or Complete Blood Exam; where you enter your blood count results from your blood tests. (With the CLL expression of CLL/SLL, tracking the lymphocyte doubling time after it climbs above 30(,000) is an important way of measuring your CLL tempo. With the SLL expression of CLL/SLL, there are under 5 (,000) lymphocytes in your blood test result. With both forms of CLL/SLL, tracking changes in your platelets and haemoglobin is a good way of assessing your bone marrow infiltration.)

CBC_CBE_Charts – Where your CBC/CBE results are charted and you can observe your trends

Biochemistry_Electrolytes – Where you enter your biochemistry/electrolyte results from your blood tests. You may not have these tested as often as the CBC/CBE.

Immunoglobulins – IgA, IgG, IgM (antibodies). These are likely to be tested far less frequently that your CBC and Biochemistry, depending on your CLL stage

Appointments – Record your medical appointment particulars here

Wellness – A range of checks that you may wish to use to monitor your well being, including weight, BMI, blood pressure

CD Markers – From your Flow Cytometry test on your peripheral blood and/or bone marrow test

There's a wealth of reference information provided in the workbook. Look for the red dots in cells indicating helpful comments. Send me a PM if you'd like a copy.

I can also highly recommend anything on this topic provided by Dr Susan Leclair, with this post a good starting point: CLL Blood Tests: Immunoglobulin, Complete Blood Counts, Platelets and More- Patient Power Video : healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

Dr. Erel Joffee, lymphoma specialist with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center also goes through what to look for in your blood test results and what to ignore in just 8 minutes, commencing at 3:30 in the video introduced in this post:

healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

The first part of his video is also very important and could save your life!

Don't get overly concerned about changes from test to test. Blood counts bounce up and down, (particularly platelet counts!), with some of the variation due to how well controlled the factors are that affect repeatability. It's the trends that are important, for the reasons explained here:

Blood Tests - accuracy and precision; why trends are important

healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

Workbook changes are detailed in the Workbook Properties, which you can examine via File...Properties and then clicking on the Description tab.

Future Support

The updated workbook has been provided in Libre/OpenOffice Calc (ODS) and Excel (XLS) formats respectively. With the plethora of Excel versions that have been released since the workbook's original release, it has proven very difficult to support the workbook across all the Excel versions now in use. The LibreOffice (ODS) version is your best choice for support or if you have suggestions for enhancements. OpenOffice should also work fine if you prefer that Office suite. Feedback/suggestions can be provided to this post or via a Private Message to AussieNeil at healthunlocked.com/aussieneil

Alternative Lite version

While this new version is fairly comprehensive, you can use as much or as little of it as you want. If you find it overwhelming, there's a simplified version (also based on Chaya's original) available from the CLL Society here: cllsociety.org/toolbox/keep...

Where can I get Calc

Calc (the excellent free, open source spreadsheet program equivalent of Excel) can be downloaded for Apple, Linux and Windows PCs from:

libreoffice.org/

openoffice.org/product/calc...

Thank you everyone that helped me update and test this update. Seymour Brown's efforts were particular appreciated.

Neil

Last updated 18th October 2023

[Cllcanada Top Poster CURE Hero]

Anyone on iStuff can view this in Safari ...if you click the XLS link...however to open it in the free Apple Numbers or the free Excel APP from Microsoft... it needs to be a downloadable file...

cllsupport.org.uk/sites/cll...

I will try with Neil to get this into a usable mobile format...

~chris

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to Cllcanada]

Apple users, thanks to Chris's work, you can now access the Excel version of the workbook in this iCloud file share link in Numbers on Apple:

icloud.com/numbers/AwBUCAES...

It also, opens as a read only file in Excel, but can be easily converted... to edit...

Neil

[Cllcanada Top Poster CURE Hero in reply to AussieNeil]

Apple users will get a message to 'Open in ShareBear' click OK... then you will go to iCloud and can download the file...

Select either Numbers or EXCEL

~chris

[kathypawpaw in reply to Cllcanada]

Thanks Chris. If you and Neil were able to post a simple spread sheet that we might use to track our blood work it would be a godsend. I am older like many of the other folks on this website so I am not as able in technology as some of my younger peers may be. Thanks to both of you for all that you do. There are no words good enough to thank you enough for your care.

Kathy

[Oleboyredw-uk]

Hi Neil,

Interesting workbook. However, I seem to be having a bit of a problem, most likely of my own making.

It looks like the date values in column A on CBC_CBE are not passed through to the charts. The dates on the x axis are 00-Jan-00 19-Feb-00 etc when all my dates start July 2012.

Also, a question: MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW and MPV are all on an additional heading above all the main items (eg RBC) so there is no room to add the data. Is that correct?

I have my own (simpler) spreadsheet I developed but would prefer to move to a standard format.

If you need any diag info or for me to do extra tests let me know. Using OSX Yosemite and Msoft Office 2016.

rob

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to Oleboyredw-uk]

Hi Rob,

Most of the problems we had with the ODS to Excel conversion were with the charts, in particular correctly displaying the dates, so I assume you used the Excel version? Please try the ODS version and let me know if that fixes the problem. Your version of Office should work fine with the ODS version (which you can save out as an Excel file when you've added your data if you wish).

ODS means 'Open Document Spreadsheet'. The Open Document format is an international standard: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenD...

Anyone with Microsoft Office 2003 may need to add in the OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in and if they are using Office 2007, it needs to be updated to service pack 2 to provide support for Open Document formatted files. (The main purpose of the Open Document standard is to prevent the incompatibilities that cause these problems...)

The MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW and MPV (Other frequently used terms) are exactly as provided in Chaya's original - more as a reference rather than for tracking use. If you want to record the values for these (and for some of us, there are good reasons for doing so), you can easily insert 5 columns between column J and K and copy the headings across. If there's enough interest in having these provided as standard, I can easily release an update with those changes, but interestingly, you are the first person to comment about that!

Thanks for the feedback,

Neil

[Oleboyredw-uk]

Neil,

I downloaded the ods and put some results in. Dates come through to charts fine, so it is either conversion to Excel or possibly a problem with excel in Office 2016. I also just noticed that I'd changed 'Your name' on the sheet and that doesn't get through to the charts either. I'm a longtime user of OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice but due to niggle compatibility issues for some things I've been doing recently decided to get Office2016 for OSX.

I'll have a poke around with it later today and let you know if I fix both.

I do have a suggestion for a possible enhancement. I'll put it into my spreadsheet then share it for comments.

Now I understand the reason for MCV etc. being on their own line I'll add them into the main part of the sheet, I have the numbers so 'need' to keep them (that's an I have it so I must track it attitude from me).

rob

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to Oleboyredw-uk]

Hi Rob,

Good to hear that you are doing OK with the ODS version. Is that using Libre/OpenOffice orOffice2016 for OSX?

It annoyed me too, that I couldn't get 'Your name' displayed on the charts after updating the reference cell and I did spend some time trying to find a way to do that in LibreOffice 4.2 with no success. If anyone can find a solution, that would be a nice improvement. Perhaps LibreOffice 5.0 has added that feature?

Thanks!

Neil

[Oleboyredw-uk]

Hi Neil,

On OSX Yosemite I have Office2016 and Libreoffice. I'm using ODS on Libreoffice and xls on Office2016. I tried opening an xlsx with Libreoffice and it destroyed all my conditional formatting (that had taken hours to do) so now I try to keep formats with their originators. The filters never seem to be quite right.

It's amazing that a couple of years away from something (Excel in this case) and you forget a load of stuff that makes life easy (was used to doing complex spreadsheets for some customer tools I wrote. This would have been easy then but now I'm scratching my head. It is gradually coming back from the grey matter archive.

rob

[bjdame]

Hi Neil - I've been tracking my blood lab results with HealthMatters.io. Have you used that?

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to bjdame]

No, but would you like to post a review?

[bjdame in reply to AussieNeil]

I've actually built the tool - so I don't think it would be fair. I can get you a free account though if you like so you can check it out.

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to bjdame]

I was going to suggest that perhaps you could write a post asking if anyone would like to try it, but given it is only available for subscription fee, that complicates matters. I can appreciate that the direct interface with some labs will make your app attractive to members using those labs, but per our community guidelines, we can't support advertising for commercial transactions.

You might like to approach CLLSociety.org to see if they are interested in a commercial relationship with you.

Neil

[OkanaganCLL]

Thank you for this information, AussieNeil!!

Cindy

[MathGuy1]

Hello AussieNeil, I have just joined healthunlocked. I was going to create a spreadsheet to track blood analysis data but I see that this has already been done. But try as I might I cannot find a link to the spreadsheet. Do you have the link? Thanks LesP

[lankisterguy Volunteer in reply to MathGuy1]

Hi MathGuy1,

Here is one spread sheet that is easy to download and use: cllsociety.org/cll-sll-pati...

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Neil  AussieNeil and I worked on an earlier version and had it posted on an older site CLLForum but the modern version of the site will not allow Excel uploads or downloads.

But the CLL Society version available at the link above is very similar these days to the version mentioned here: healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

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Len

[MathGuy1 in reply to lankisterguy]

Hi Len lankisterguy, thanks for responding so quickly. I would like to do some other charts as it relates to Waldenström's Macroglobulinemia (WM). In particular I would like to do a chart for Beta-2-Microglobulin, LDH and Albumin. They are part of the International Prognostic Scoring System for WM (IPSSWM). Although I have not done any excel work recently I used to work with it a lot. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Les

[lankisterguy Volunteer in reply to MathGuy1]

Hi MathGuy1

The CLL Society spread sheet can be modified, any columns you aren't interested in using can be repurposed. So perhaps you can move the LDH, B2M and Albumin to a different column.

If you choose a test result column that is already linked to a plot / chart it can get interesting and may or may not work well without tweaking some of the chart features.

And it's been too many years since I poked around under the hood of the chart set ups (and of course MicroSoft changes the menus, terms and explanations during each monthly software update) so good luck on linking the data column to a plot chart.

Len

[MathGuy1]

I have found the link, sorry for the bother Neil. I will be tracking data for small mature b-cell lymphoma, probably lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma or Waldenstrom Macroglobulinemia.

Thanks LesP