Freya Burrell · West Yorkshire

Hello. I make data look like someone cared.

I've got a Fine Arts degree and I work in operations, which is a strange combination that turns out to be quite useful. I spend my days in spreadsheets and my evenings making better ones. This is where I put them.

absence-tracker.xlsx
Make it care

Things I've made

Some of these are for sale, some are free, one of them is a plant. They all started the same way — something was annoying me and nobody had fixed it.

01

An app for people with POTS, built around a pot plant called Basil who wilts when you haven't had enough water or salt.

I built it for me. I've got POTS, and managing it is mostly a matter of remembering to do dull things constantly — drink, salt, don't stand up too fast. Every app I tried treated that like a fitness challenge. Charts. Streaks. Little trophies. It isn't a challenge, it's a Tuesday.

So Basil. He's a pot plant. He wilts when you're doing badly and perks up when you're not. That's the whole interface. No score, no streak to break, nothing to feel guilty about at 11pm.

It's built in React Native with Rive for the animation, and it runs on my phone right now. It might never leave my phone. That's allowed.

02

Absence, performance, workforce. The same spreadsheet I kept rebuilding for different people, finally done properly.

Every team I've worked with has the same file. Someone made it years ago, it's held together with nested IFs, one column is called Column14, and nobody dares touch it because nobody knows what breaks.

So I built a good one. About 3,400 formulas doing the arithmetic underneath, so the person using it types dates into boxes and gets an answer. No pivot tables. No training day. It looks like something you'd put in front of a board because that's usually where it ends up.

I put it on Etsy to find out whether it was just me. It wasn't.

See them on Etsy

03

Enter the dates, get the score, find out what it actually means.

Somebody asked me what their absence score meant and I couldn't find a single page worth sending them. Every result was either a formula with no context or a form wanting an email address first.

The Bradford Factor is spells × spells × days. That's it. The number itself is meaningless until someone tells you that 200 is a conversation and 500 is a process, so the calculator says that part too.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and it forgets you the moment you close the tab. It's free and there's no email box.

162
Medium — worth an informal chat
3 × 3 × 18

Open the full calculator

04

Room booking for teams currently doing it with a shared calendar nobody trusts and one person who Actually Knows.

Every building I've worked in books its rooms the same way: a calendar that's wrong, a printed grid by the kettle, and somebody's memory. It holds up until two people want the same room at nine.

So Rooms does the obvious part properly. Pick a site, pick a room, pick a time. If it clashes it tells you while you're typing, shows you what it clashes with, and offers you the next free slot instead of making you go and look. You can book on someone else's behalf, and there's a kiosk mode for a screen on the wall so walk-ins can see what's free without asking anyone.

The part I'm actually pleased with isn't the booking though — it's the numbers underneath. Utilisation by site and by room, load by hour, who's booking the most, and a figure for how much capacity was sitting there bookable and nobody booked it. Most systems tell you what's taken. This one tells you what you're wasting, which is the number that changes anything.

Rooms · today invented data · try a slot
Pick a slot. Green is free, grey is taken.

Clinics, charities, schools, offices. 14-day trial, no setup fee.

Ask me about Rooms rooms.furrell.com — opening soon

05

A shared workspace for a small ops team — what we're doing, what we might do, and what the board is actually asking about.

Ops teams run on three different lists that never agree: the projects on the go, the ideas nobody's picked up, and the handful of priorities leadership keeps asking about. Usually that's a spreadsheet, a Teams channel and somebody's notebook.

Ledger puts them in one place. Projects have an owner and a state. Ideas sit in a pile until someone clicks pick this up and it becomes theirs. And the big quarterly priorities live on their own board, with a present mode for when you're asked to walk through them.

Ledger · ideas invented data · go on then
Nobody's picked this up
✦ someone in the team

Sort out the shared drive

Nobody can find anything and there are four folders called "final"

It's built on Supabase with a proper login, and it's in daily use — which is the only test of this sort of thing that counts. Every feature in it exists because the lack of it annoyed someone.

The shop

Templates you open and use. No formulas to write, no training day, no subscription. A few quid on Etsy.

Template

Absence tracker

Bradford scores, absence rates and monthly breakdowns, calculated as you type.

Excel · Google Sheets
Template

Performance dashboards

Turn a month of numbers into something people will actually look at.

Excel · Google Sheets
Template

Workforce trackers

Who's in, who's out, what it costs — instead of six tabs and a good memory.

Excel · Google Sheets
See everything on Etsy

How I got here

I studied Fine Arts. Then I ended up in operations, which is about as far from a life drawing class as you can get, and found myself staring at spreadsheets that were completely correct and totally unreadable.

That bothered me more than it probably should have. So I started fixing them. First formulas, then Apps Script when formulas ran out, then enough Python and HTML to be properly dangerous. Nobody taught me any of it — I just kept getting it wrong until it worked.

Turns out the art degree wasn't a detour. Most data is presented badly, and knowing why something looks wrong is a skill you can't pick up from a formula reference.

Furrell is a side project, not a company. Some templates, some free tools, and somewhere to keep the things I make. If one of them saves you an afternoon, that's the whole idea.

StudiedFine Arts
DoOperations
Learned byGetting it wrong first
Build withSheets · Apps Script · Python
BasedWest Yorkshire
CurrentlyTeaching a plant to wilt

About the data on this site

Short version: none of it is real, and none of it is yours.

The demo table

Everyone in it is invented

The names, the absence spells, the scores — all made up to show what the formatting does. They are not real people and are not based on real people. Any resemblance to someone with the same name is coincidence, and I'd rather you told me than assumed otherwise.

The free tools

Nothing leaves your browser

The Bradford calculator runs entirely on your machine. Whatever you type is never sent to me, never stored, and is gone when you close the tab. There's no analytics on it and no account to make.

The templates

They're just files

You download a spreadsheet and it's yours. It doesn't phone home, doesn't sync anywhere, and doesn't need an internet connection to work. Whatever you put in it stays in it.

My day job

None of it is here

I build things at work and I build things here, and the two don't mix. Nothing on this site comes from my employer's data, systems or files, and none of the work I do for them appears in it. That line matters to me more than the site does.

Got a spreadsheet that's ruining your week?

Tell me about it. I'm nosy about other people's data problems and I might just make the thing.

Say hello