Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

[Moebius]

This is an Excel spreadsheet I created as a game aid. It has an automated sidebar for tracking DEX and SPEED order.

 

I was bored one day and thought that I might automate the process for the combat order in my campaign. While I was at it I could have a handy place for my player character’s at a glance information.

 

The next day this is what I had. I have been using it for about half a year now and it works smoothly. I just enter in the NPC’s information on the second page; all it really needs is the villain’s name, DEX and SPEED. Then I print out either, just the sidebar, or more often the whole PC’s page. It does have some problems with lots of high-speed characters. Sometimes, I can just reduce the text of the sidebar to compensate.

 

The sidebar populates from just Character Name, DEX and SPEED, the rest is just a handy reference for Characteristics and other useful things for game play.

 

The second worksheet in the excel file is not automated though I use it much more rarely these days. Mostly I just wanted to offer GMs a chance to have something to reduce a little of the combat tracking work.

 

The file is protected, though there is no password. This is just to make it more convenient to tab through fields or prevent overtyping on named fields.

 

Attempted to replace a corrupted .zip file. See later posting.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

I must be doing something wrong. I get a zip file with lots of other files in - 29 of them - none of which seem to be excel files as such and which, if I do open with excel, it tells me the data is 'delimited' and gives me gibberish.

 

I don't suppose you could include some instructions for the thinking impaired, could you?

 

Other than that it looks great

[Trebuchet]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

I must be doing something wrong. I get a zip file with lots of other files in - 29 of them - none of which seem to be excel files as such and which, if I do open with excel, it tells me the data is 'delimited' and gives me gibberish.

 

I don't suppose you could include some instructions for the thinking impaired, could you?

 

Other than that it looks great

I had exactly the same problem.

 

Just post it as a .xls file; it can't be all that large.

[Maelstrom]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Tried this myself with the same results.

[Netzilla]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

The whole thing actually appears to be an archive of Java class files rather than Excel files.

 

[EDIT] Needless to say, since they are not the files or format advertised, I recommend against trying to run any of them.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

The whole thing actually appears to be an archive of Java class files rather than Excel files.

 

I'm glad we sorted that out

 

So, er, how do you run them?

[Netzilla]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

I'm glad we sorted that out

 

So, er, how do you run them?

 

I wouldn't recommend running any code that was originally described as being something other than what it actually is. It might be a harmless mistake but it's a new poster on an internet message board. Better to let the original poster explain what happened.

 

Of course, you could get a Java decompiler and examine the code to see if it's anything harmful but

 

1) that's a lot of work

 

and

 

2) if a developer doesn't release his source code to the public there's plenty of legitimate reasons not to violate that trust

[teh bunneh]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

MOD: I've deleted the attachment. If Mobius wants to re-attach the correct file, that's fine. But Netzilla is right -- don't run strange Jave files on your machine.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Java - that's the one that lets you brew coffee, isn't it?

 

God I hope so....

[Netzilla]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Maybe

 

[Sean Waters]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

[Moebius]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Lets try it again. Here for your review the Excel Spreadsheet.

Incidentally the sheet should not have any active macros.

[Netzilla]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Yep, that's an Excel spreadsheet.

 

I'll play around with it a bit later. Could be useful as I'm just about ready to start up a new campaign.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

That's very nice. I can see that being useful - thanks for posting it

[Moebius]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

So ... The attachments function will not accept Excel spreadsheets. It will accept .zip files.

 

I tried to get Windows XP to archive an Excel spreadsheet. It unarchives them just fine. Well, lets just say that did not work. So, I dropped back punted and found an old copy of Winzip. A short while later, we have it, my Excel spreadsheet in a .zip file. Sorry for the confusion. Until about six months ago, I was using my trusty Win98SE. It is no longer supported.

[Netzilla]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

Well, I got a chance to play around with this a little bit this weekend. Overall, I like the layout and it's nicely automated. However, I did notice a couple oddities.

 

On the 'Combat Order' sheet, it seems to be rounding OCV & DCV up. If you enter a 10 DEX, CV computes as 4; if you enter a 13 DEX, CV computes as 5. These should actually be 3 and 4, respectively. This formula seems to be correct on the 'Combat Statistics' sheet.

 

When I went to see if I could correct the formula, it shows in the cell as simply "=OCV_Combat_Order". Obviously Excel has evolved past when when I was an 'Expert' with it (Excel 97) as I couldn't find a way to edit that other than to just over-write it with my own formula.

 

The 'Combat Statistics' sheet doesn't appear to have any problems. I did want to modify it a bit as I use INT as a tiebreaker, but when I unhid the Ranking sheet to see how the 'Combat Order' was calculated I took a look at those formula and thought, "wow, that's a lot of work". I don't envy you having done that in the first place.

[Moebius]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

On the 'Combat Order' sheet, it seems to be rounding OCV & DCV up. If you enter a 10 DEX, CV computes as 4; if you enter a 13 DEX, CV computes as 5. These should actually be 3 and 4, respectively. This formula seems to be correct on the 'Combat Statistics' sheet.

 

When I went to see if I could correct the formula, it shows in the cell as simply "=OCV_Combat_Order". Obviously Excel has evolved past when when I was an 'Expert' with it (Excel 97) as I couldn't find a way to edit that other than to just over-write it with my own formula.

 

Thankyou, I missed that, and have updated it in the sheet. I will post an update with that change made, it can be manually changed by changing the formula by using the Insert menu > Name > Define, then selecting the appropriate formula and changing it

 

=IF('Combat Order'!$C4>0,INT(('Combat Order'!$C4+1)/3),"")

Is the correct formula for that both OCV and DCV cells.

 

The 'Combat Statistics' sheet doesn't appear to have any problems. I did want to modify it a bit as I use INT as a tiebreaker, but when I unhid the Ranking sheet to see how the 'Combat Order' was calculated I took a look at those formula and thought, "wow, that's a lot of work". I don't envy you having done that in the first place.

 

It orders ties based on what order they show up on the spreadsheet. So, if you put them in descending order based solely on INT it would give you the same effect.

 

The sidebar only looks at DEX, SPEED, and Character Name

 

Thank you alot, many of those cells had to be individualy formatted, took a while but it makes it take about two minutes to add three or four villains and print out a sidebar.

[Knightgoblin]

Re: Excel Spreadsheet for tracking Combat Order

 

This is great! very handy for combat. I like the side panel in the combat statistics tab.

Question: Are you going to update this? If you do I request there maybe be a 3rd tab for the side panel bar. This way more than 6 characters can be kept track of in combat. Or something like that done so that all the characters names can be seen on the panel.

 

Again this is great. Thanks! I'm definitely going to use this for my games.