Figuring out exactly how many people are in my collection

I'm back! I finally went and saw The Force Awakens today. I don't want to give any spoilers, but...I was not particularly happy with it. I was enjoying it but then they threw away any enjoyment I could find in it. And that's the entirety of what I'm going to talk about it for now and that alone should tell you what I think.

I didn't go on the internet at all since my last post, which wasn't actually as hard as I thought it would be. I missed the Database, and I missed blogging, but other than that...well, I was actually having fun with my cards.

An idea hit me several weeks ago- figure out how many people are in my collection. I already knew how many were in my NBA collection, and NASCAR collection, but I have lots of other cards in my collection and I had no real idea. So, I got out all the other cards- almost all of which I received as gifts during 2015...and went through every single one, typing each name into an Excel chart, one sheet for each sport or topic and then one other sheet with all of them combined. It was a lot of work, taking me three full days. I can't guarantee I got it totally correct- there may be people entered twice, there may be people I missed- but this is good enough for me to be happy with the end result.

Before I show the screencap of the stats page, here is a picture of my stash of cards already entered into the Database before I could scan them...or at least part of it. There are more NBA cards not included in this photo. These boxes cover at least 7 sports plus non-sports cards...two angles of the same boxes. All but about 150 of these cards were either given to me as gifts or came to me in trades since June 2014. It's been one heck of a year (and a half)!

OK...here's the grand totals....

I've already gotten more names since I originally finished. A friend sent me a small stack of several sports that saw me add names to the football, baseball and 1 hockey. Also, during the time I was away from the blogs, 2015-16 Panini Prizm and 2015-16 Complete came out, and I got new NBA players in both sets.

At some point, I plan to type up a complete listing as a page along the top here- and denote which aspect of the collection they come from- but I am not sure when I will get to it. There's a good chance I won't get to it until 2016, as the conclusion of 2015 is rapidly approaching, and I have some other card related things I need to do by the end of the year that take precedence.

There are actually a LOT more names than I thought there would be. I estimated in the 5000 range, but I was way off!

A couple of notes on how I did the counting. First, the person had to have a card all their own. A person who shares a card, or only appears on a team card, is not counted. Only people living on this planet, at some time or another, are counted. No comic, Star Wars, etc. are included. Multi is people who have cards in more than one sport. IE, Brad Daugherty...known for his NBA career, but also has cards in NASCAR. NCAA basketball is players who did not make the NBA...or in a couple of cases, I am missing the NBA cards but do have college card(s) of the person. Other basketball is mostly Harlem Globetrotters, but also includes a few international players. For baseball, football and hockey, pro and college is combined. Note that there are more hockey names than there are NASCAR, despite the fact that I've been collecting NASCAR cards for 23 years this coming Saturday. Before January 31st this year, I had 28 hockey cards....total.