Excel at enchanting

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Aloha all and welcome to the official return of the AH pile. Here is where you'll find the best tips on the entire internets on how to make yourself swim in WoW gold. It's been a long break for me, but vacation is over and work is sorted so now it's time to start working the AH. I am now officially back and will be writing everyday Monday - Friday and with special side projects I might have on the weekends. I hope all of my old readers still enjoy and learn more and for all you new readers, don't be intimidated by the content. Go back and read as much as you can as you will learn a lot.

It feels great to be back and I'm looking forward to more AH silliness and crazy trade antics. One last note. I'm still actively working on updating The List as I work more and more in certain markets. Look forward to seeing it in a week or so.

And now on with the post!
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This is something I mentioned a few times in the past and am going to go in depth with it today. For enchanting and anything else with semi complicated material costs (I'm looking at you engineering!) I use a Microsoft Excel document to easily keep track of how much I should be selling my wares for. First here's a link to megaupload to get the basic enchanting version I've put together to include cata enchants. Note that in this file, I'm using a one day snapshot of the prices on my server just so you can see how it works. Just change things around as needed for your personal prices. If you don't have Microsoft Excel you can also use OpenOffice which can be gotten for free from their website here

My spreadsheet

The point of using an Excel doc is to help you keep track of thresholds in a market where prices change often, which is everything at the start of a new expansion by the way. It also lets you find out a specific threshold amount and refer back to it later in case something with your addOns gets FUBAR. And of course if you stop working a certain market and come back to it later on prices will likely have changed by then so you can just type in the current prices of everything and find out how much you should be selling it for.

Ok now that you have it, here's a quick once over on how it all works.


In column A you have a listing of all the materials you could be using for enchanting. Simple enough.

In Column C you see the average price that you pay for these materials in stacks of 1.

In Columns E and G are the lists of all the things you do with enchanting.

Columns F and I are the minimum prices that you should sell these scrolls for to make a 15% profit on the mats. This is where it gets interesting.


Excel has an automatic calculator function that you can work with. Each of the little boxes you see are called "cells" like next to the material list you see their price in each cell. Using Enchant Shield - Blocking as an example, here's the simple version of what's going on here.

I'm telling Excel to multiply the price of hypnotic dust by 12, add the cost of a vellum, and then add 15% to all of that and let me know the answer. The actual math question behind that is:


((Dust x 12) + VellumPrice) x 1.15 = Sale Price


Not too complicated right? The only catch is that Excel has no clue WTF dust means so you have to refer to it by the cell number. In this case, the cell for the price of dust is C10 and the cell of vellum is C45. Note that you have to use the "*" symbol to multiply and not the letter "X". This translates into Excel-speak as:


=((C10*12)+C45)*1.15



If you don't get it try to remember back to your freshman year algebra class. If you don't get it still, go FIND your algebra teacher and apologize to them for saying their class was stupid and how you'll never ever use it in real life evar. It's ok, I can wait.

Alright back? Good, hope it went well. Not really, but moving on.


Here's how to set it up yourself for your own market values and buying thresholds and work it into other professions if you want.

1. Set up the columns and name them as you see fit. Be sure to leave plenty of room. If you have to move something down you need to make sure that you drag the sale price column the same amount as the item name or you'll have some strange looking prices.

2. Type in your buying thresholds of all the mats in the price column. Make sure you put in the value as singles and not full stacks.

3. Select a cell in the sale price column next to an enchant.

4. Up top you'll see a long bar with a red X, green check mark, and FX next to it. Leave the far left alone where it says "SUM." This is where you type in the pricing equation. Here's how you form the equations for each one:

=((materialCell*amount)+(materialCell*amount))*1.15

The 1.15 at the end is where you set how much profit you want to be making. I have mine at 15% because I'm a dick like that. If want to be making at least 30% profit change the 1.15 at the end to 1.30 and you're set. If you just want to know the total cost of all the materials then just remove the whole *1.15 at the end. After you have the equation typed in hit the green check mark and Excel will double check your math and let yo uknow if you done goofed up. If you did it will ask if you want it to try and fix it for you which works sometimes and sometimes not.

Either way once you have that set it will spit out a number in the price cell and that's how much that scroll should be sold for to make a 15% profit. Now this is almost always going to give you a decimal answer (the numbers after the decimal should be translated as silver). If you want to get rid of that there's an icon at the top right with an arrow and a bunch of 0's on it. When you mouse over the icon it will say "remove decimal." Hit this and Excel will round the number up, so a price of 8.2 becomes 9. That part is just personal preference, but I like it that way. Of course if you want to know the EXACT amount you can just ignore that part and be on your merry way to the AH.

Lastly here's a short recap of what you can use this for. Markets where material prices change rapidly. A secondary listing of your sale thresholds. A reminder if you leave and reenter a market. an easy way to figure out how much something should be sold for. If you should bother crafting or just sell the mats if you're not trying to push somebody out.


Ok that should do it, I hope you learned something and can find a use for this. Feel free to share this with anybody that you want. All I ask is that you make sure to direct them to where you found it at.


Thanks for stopping by!