David Gregory's Block Blog

How many of you know how many LEGOs you have?  Most AFOL's have some general idea of how many pieces they own, but it's often some figure that's appended with the phrase "give or take about 50,000."  If you have a LUGNET membership, you can enter the number of each LEGO set that you own.  The site will then generate a set list for you that gives quantities of every set you own, sets you want to buy and sets you want to sell.  (To see this list, use the URL http://guide.lugnet.com/set/mlist.cgi?m= and enter your LUGNET membership number at the end.)  At the bottom of the list, there is a sum of the total number of sets and the total number of pieces.

My current set list states my piece total as 229,533 pieces.

That probably seems like a lot, and you're right—I've been collecting LEGO sets since I was a kid, and I never had a Dark Age, so I have accumulated quite a large collection.  Sometimes the little devil on my shoulder even tells me that I have too many LEGOs, but I usually toss him in the trash and then listen to the little angel on my other shoulder who tells me that God wants me to have more LEGOs.

Back when LUGNET existed, but Bricklink and ebay did not, the LUGNET set list was a good way to see how many LEGOs you actually had.  Back then all my pieces were from sets I had bought, so I could look at that list's total to know the size of my collection.  However, there are a few flaws in the LUGNET set guide.  They're not really "flaws," but gaps in information.  For instance, LUGNET does not yet have the new mini Clone Turbo Tank that comes with the Brickmaster mailing.  That's 64 pieces that I have in a set that doesn't show up in my LUGNET set list.  The sets that are missing from the LUGNET set guide are few and far between, so those sets don't make much of a dent in my piece total.  BUT there are several sets in LUGNET's guide that don't have any entry for how many pieces they have.  For example the 320 BASIC Building Set has 71 pieces listed on the pictorial inventory on the box, but LUGNET doesn't have any piece count for the set, so even though this set shows up as one that I own, it adds a big fat 0 to my piece total.  The same lack of information holds true to sets 337, 385, 537 (all BASIC sets from the 80's), several 3 digit sets from the 70's, and even several sets from the 90's.  So my current LUGNET set list is actually showing a smaller number of pieces than what I own due to the lack of piece counts on several sets.  Still, this isn't that bad when I've broken the 200,000 piece mark.

Now I know what most of you must be thinking at this point: What about all the thousands of loose parts you've bought that weren't from sets?  That is a valid question indeed.  With the advent of loose part sales on the internet, my collection was blessed with a rich variety of whatever I could find and afford.  LUGCO member Todd Trotter first told me about Bricklink in 2000.  I began using ebay the same year.  Since then I've pretty much been on one long LEGO-buying binge.  Two of the three main sources for buying loose parts are internet sites: Bricklink and ebay.  The third source is the Pick-A-Brick at LEGO stores.  If I wanted a big raw number for my Bricklink purchases, I could download it.  (Did you know you can do that?  Go to the Bricklink Download page, and you can download info from your entire Bricklink buying history, including number of parts in orders, shipping costs, year totals, etc.)

Loose parts certainly pose a daunting barrier to knowing how many parts you own.  Luckily I began a system of keeping track of this way back when I started buying loose pieces.  I have an Excel spreadsheet for each category of piece.  Whenever I get an order from Bricklink or bring home a batch of non-set pieces from P.A.B. or wherever, I add the quantity of each piece to the Excel sheets.  This may seem like an overly complicated and unnecessary task, but I have found it to be very helpful when I need to know how many of a certain piece I have.  I have also become very efficient with my piece assimilation system over the years, so it doesn't take as long as you might think.

Now it would seem that I have a simple method for determining the total number of LEGOs that I own.  I take the piece total in my LUGNET set list and add it to whatever the total is from the Excel sheets of loose parts...after all, Excel can add up all those numbers automatically, right?  ...RIGHT?  Unfortunately the answer to that is NO.  A couple of years ago, I decided to add up all the parts in those Excel sheets to get a grand total of what I had.  Excel has a sum function where it will add up the numbers in a row or column or whatever.  My Excel sheets had the quantities in a single column, so I figured that it would be pretty easy to make the program show me a sum in the cell at the bottom of the column.  I found out how to use the sum function, and I thought all was going well.  I tried to use the sum function on my Tiles spreadsheet.  The total was way smaller than I thought it should have been.  I double checked the Excel sum by taking a calculator and manually adding the numbers in each cell of the column.  The real sum was about 1,200 more than what Excel was telling me.  Just to make sure I double checked the sum by adding it all up on the calculator again.  Excel was still wrong.

There are times when I REALLY hate computers.  This was one of them.  I found it hard to believe that a complex program such as Excel could not do such a simple task as adding numbers.  I went to the Microsoft Office site and downloaded the update they had for Office.  "Surely this 27 meg of updates will fix the problem," I thought.  I was wrong.  Excel still couldn't ad!  I tried other spreadsheets and found that a few more of them had the same problem.  At that point I gave up.  I wasn't going to take the time to use a calculator to add up every single number cell in every spreadsheet.

Last week I asked my sister if she could open up my Tiles spreadsheet on her computer.  I knew that she had a newer version of Office than I did, and I thought that her version might do the math right.  She said that she had the same number in the sum cell that I did, but it showed her these tiny triangles in the corner of some of the cells.  When she clicked on the triangle it told her that the cell should be converted to a number cell.  When she did that, the sum cell had THE CORRECT SUM!    This was very good news to me.

I have absolutely no idea why Excel would convert random cells in my spreadsheets into non-number cells.  (I'm talking seriously random; they weren't grouped together or anything.)  I went through each sheet and made sure that each cell with a number in it was viewed as a number cell, then I redid the sum cells at the bottom of each column.  It took a while, but I was finally able to get an accurate count of how many loose pieces I had.

I admit that I still have some work to do with this.  I haven't made sum cells for my spreadsheets of minifigs, nor have I made sums for parts that are made of multiple pieces, such as elephants.  I still have thousands of P.A.B. pieces laying around that I haven't assimilated into the collection yet, and a couple of tubs of other random parts that I don't have a spreadsheet for...but short by a few thousand pieces, I have:

Insert drumroll here

I've been telling people "about 350,000" when they ask me how many LEGOs I have, so I guess I was fairly close.