That sounds like a great plan for exploring fastai! I had a similar experience when I combined Excel with my deep learning projects. I used myexcel to manage my experiments and keep track of different learning rates and model parameters. It really helped me organize everything in a way that made it easier to analyze results and iterate on my experiments. Like you, I found that Excel is incredibly useful for detailed tracking and analysis, even in deep learning. Keeping detailed notes and using Excel to experiment can definitely make a difference.