Spreadsheet for Evaluating Your IMDb Ratings

As a nerd for numbers and spreadsheets, I made a sheet that compares your movie ratings to IMDb's, breaking it down by overall, decade, top 250, Oscar winners, and more. I'm sharing in case you are interested in using it.

Here is the spreadsheet.

Instructions

1. Download the spreadsheet at the link above.

2. Go to the IMDb desktop site, hover over your name in the top right corner, and click "Your Ratings."

3. Click the three vertical dots in the top right corner, and click "Export". This will download an Excel file called "ratings".

4. Open the "ratings" spreadsheet. Press Ctrl+A to select the entire table, but make sure you don't select the entire sheet or else you will overwrite equations in my spreadsheet. With the table selected, press Ctrl+C to copy it.

5. Open my spreadsheet, and go to the tab "Raw Data." Click on cell A1, then press Ctrl+V to paste the data. This spreadsheet has a lot of equations, so Excel will probably freeze for 1-5 minutes while it does all the computations, so just be patient.

6. To update the sheet with new ratings, simply follow the exact same process. It is okay to paste your new "ratings" data over the existing data in the "Raw Data" tab.

"Overall by Decade" tab

This tab gives you an overview of everything you've rated. The line "Overall" covers everything, weighting each movie individually. The other lines cover each decade.

For the "Agreement" column, that calculates the average percent difference between your ratings and the IMDb rating. The closer this is to zero, the closer your opinions match those of the IMDb userbase. For example, my overall agreement is -48%, which means I tend to rate things lower than most IMDb users. By decade, I can see that I tend to dislike older films (-87% in the 1920s) more often than newer films (-36% in the 2000s).

You can also scroll to the right to see the individual movies in each decade category.

"Overall by Type" tab

This is very similar to the "Overall by Decade" tab, but it divides them by type (movie, series, etc.) rather than decade. Note that I intentionally left out the TV Episode type because I assume that is covered by your TV Series rating. If there are other categories that I am missing, let me know and I will add them.

A neat feature of this tab is that it shows you how much of your life has been dedicated to the silver screen. This tab shows the approximate amount of time that you have spent watching shows, not including rewatches. However, most of IMDb's TV series runtimes are entered as episode lengths rather than total time. For a more accurate time calculation, scroll to the right to reach the "TV Mini Series" and "TV Series" categories. For each show, enter the number of episodes you have watched into the yellow column, and the spreadsheet will do the rest. Or you can ignore this step if you'd rather not know how much time you've "wasted"; ignorance is bliss.

"IMDb Top 250" tab

This tab gives you a breakdown of your ratings for the IMDb Top 250. These are broken down by year. For simplicity, I've used the 250 lists from each year according to the IMDb badges, which run from 1996 to last year. Titles you haven't seen have "Not Watched" appear beside them, and the sheet also tells you how many more for each year that you still need to watch.

"IMDb Oscar Highlights" tab

This is similar to the Top 250 tab, using the Oscar Highlights IMDb badges, which runs from 2005 to the last Oscar ceremony.

"Oscar Best Pictures" tab

This is similar to the previous two tabs, but looks at Oscar Best Picture winners from the first Oscars (1927) to the most recent, broken down by decade.

Potential Issues

These are things that can be fixed with a little work on your (or my) part.

1. It only works for three titles of the same name. For example, The Tick, The Tick, and The Tick. If you have more than three items with the same title... maybe you need to branch out? Just kidding, I can add the option to have more titles, but I just haven't had the need to do that for myself yet. Maybe when they reboot The Tick for the 3rd time... If you have more than 3 items with the same title, don't worry because it won't mess up anything in the spreadsheet. It will call the wrong rating and runtime, which will probably have a very minor effect on your results.

2. The spreadsheet currently allows for 10,000 total items, 10,000 movies, 2,000 shows, and 250 of each other item type (video, short, etc.). I tried to use reasonable numbers that were still fairly small to keep the spreadsheet calculation time at a minimum. If you need more than those, then I am jealous of your free time. Leave a comment below, and I can help guide you through adding more lines.

3. Some item information is missing from IMDb! Namely, the dates and runtimes for less popular items can occasionally be missing. To check these, go the "Raw Data" tab, click "Release Date" at the top, then hold Ctrl and press the down arrow. If this takes you to the bottom of the table, then you have no missing data. If this takes you to an empty cell, then you have a missing date. You can simply look up the date and type that into the cell, but it would make your life easier to update the spreadsheet if you added the release date info into the IMDb page. You can repeat all of this for the "Runtime" column as well.

To update the IMDb page:

1. Go to the IMDb desktop site, and look up the item.

2. Scroll down to Details, and click "Edit" to the right of the word "Details".

3. Beside each item you want to change ("Release Dates" or "Running Times"), click the drop down arrow and select "Add 1 item."

4. Scroll down and click "Continue."

5. Enter the required info, then scroll down to select "Check these updates."

6. Click "Submit".