D&D 4E Wonko's 4E Auto Character Sheet + Custom Power Cards

[Wonko the Sane]

When did A.7 come out? I only see .6 on the first page

v1.45.a.7 was never sent out...it was basically a working release that got kinda messy. My current working copy is getting a bit of an overhaul...sort of an "I've already got the thing up on the lift - might as well fix everything while I'm here" thing. A lot of formulas were becoming too complicated, so they are getting a facelift.

The good news is, when I finally get 1.46.A.1 out, Martial Power will be fully implemented. I would do mini-updates like I did with AV, but there's a lot of cross-dependency between feats and powers - a lot of it won't work until it all works, sort of thing.

I'm going to be adding the Remarkable Races line from Alluria Publishing in the very near future as well.

I hope I can get MotP in and be caught up for a while before the PHB2 comes out. I'm starting to see spreadsheets every time I close my eyes.

 

[dako1001]

Adding custom material

I am not a grand master of the Excel programming that you are WtS. So I ask this question of you.

Is there a way to add custom races/powers/feats/etc... that is easy to comprehend for a layman Excel programming virgin such as myself?

I do not even see the data where the sheets get thier information.

Humbly asking for your help with this...

 

[Wonko the Sane]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: I'm trying to figure out a way for a user to enter custom material that is both easy and able to be imported from one version to the next without having to copy/paste it over.

(BTW...I'm hardly a grand master at this...if I was, it would be easy to reverse engineer what I've done and add your own material. Instead, the code pretty much looks like a dog's breakfast - unhide the Powers sheet and take a look if you don't believe me )

 

[GC1CEO]

Biggest question to that one is how much do you change the format in which data is stored within the sheet when you make revisions. If it is frequent, yea thats going to be a pain. However you could make a feature that converts custom-saved data into a CSV file tagged with the version, each worksheet would simply have to know the data format for version and then just sort the data into its current data format... If not very often, it should be simpler.

However that means that a custom race, feat, etc couldn't do anything that a current race, feat, etc doesn't already do. I.E a race gives the same general type of benefits, attribute bonuses, etc.

 

[Wonko the Sane]

That does sound easy. The only problem is that I have no idea what a CSV file is.
I think I've thought of a way, but it's a couple of revisions off yet. I just started a week of 24/7 stand-by for work, so it won't be this week.

 

[seanna2000]

About CSV files, Excel, Access, Visual Basic, and exporting and importing data

That does sound easy. The only problem is that I have no idea what a CSV file is.
I think I've thought of a way, but it's a couple of revisions off yet. I just started a week of 24/7 stand-by for work, so it won't be this week.

CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. CSV files are what we call "flat files" in my field. They can only contain 1 table of data, and so if there are 2 or more tables of data, the tables would have to be "flattened" into 1 table, hence causing repetitions here and there. Not very nice. You have already done a good job with Excel, but if I had been here earlier, I would have suggested using Access, since you probably do not have access to Visual Basic which would have been so much easier to program with for a character sheet of such complexity. In Access, you could have created several tables of data and thus made things a lot easier. This of course requires some knowledge of the basics of database design and normalization, but it's not that difficult to get, considering you managed to do all this in Excel.

Anyway, we're stuck with either Excel or Access along with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Access with VBA would have been great and easy to design, export and import. There is also supposed to be a way to integrate Excel and Access, but I haven't tried that before, since I mostly delve in things like C++, Java and Visual Basic. However, I have done Access with VBA before, and it's rather easy to design and implement with. Especially when it comes to your character sheet. Okay, maybe it wouldn't look as close to the pen & paper character sheet, but it would be quite functional and user-friendly if you did the user interface well.

So, unless you can get a copy of Visual Basic and learn how to program with it, you're stuck with CSV files for exporting and importing. So if you have designed your data in a format that wouldn't fit into a single table, you could try exporting the data in separate CSV files (1 table per file), and importing them in the same manner, just in reverse.

Either that, or you'd have to learn Access and VBA and how to integrate it with Excel.

Or, you could get a hold of and master Visual Basic (which will probably take too much time).

 

[Wonko the Sane]

I'll fire up the ol' Googlizer when I'm not so busy and look into CSV files and how ignorant it'll be for me to implement...I'm intrigued by the thought of learning VB/VBA, but I just don't have the time to try to make this work on another platform. I understand and can use Excel, but trying to make anything in Access makes me feel like Jerry Lewis in a closet full of wire hangers.

Thanks for the ideas!

 

[GC1CEO]

Yea I agree, you can do alot with Excel period. If I recall, Office 2007 changed VBA to something else?

CSV is just an example of keeping something in an external universally-readable file between changes in the worksheet itself. You can do the same with exporting to an XML format nowdays too, which is alot better imo.

At any rate, just my two cents in cause I'm a big fan of your worksheet since I have determined it to be the only fairly-complete (in terms of picking things from lists and making calculations) way to make a higher level character. I made a Shadar-Kai cleric, mixed up with ranger abilities (way of the warrior, adept, novice, etc) the other day with it and saved me -alot- of time.

 

[seanna2000]

Yea I agree, you can do alot with Excel period. If I recall, Office 2007 changed VBA to something else?

CSV is just an example of keeping something in an external universally-readable file between changes in the worksheet itself. You can do the same with exporting to an XML format nowdays too, which is alot better imo.

At any rate, just my two cents in cause I'm a big fan of your worksheet since I have determined it to be the only fairly-complete (in terms of picking things from lists and making calculations) way to make a higher level character. I made a Shadar-Kai cleric, mixed up with ranger abilities (way of the warrior, adept, novice, etc) the other day with it and saved me -alot- of time.

Actually, Microsoft didn't change VBA to anything else in Office 2007. They just added further support for certain MS Office applications to VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) which started in Office 2003 if I'm not mistaken. VBA is still a built-in part of Office, whereas VSTO is a kind of add-on to Visual Studio, which requires really expensive licensing. So unless Wonko is a rich fella (i.e. already has or can afford to buy Visual Studio .NET), or a REALLY BIG fan of Microsoft, he's stuck with VBA. Which is why I chose to discuss more on things that are easier to obtain. VBA isn't bad if you know how to use it, though I admit it is rather pale compared to full-blown Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET, or even the classic Visual Basic 6.

As for using XML versus using CSV files, I personally think that it would be a lot easier and better to use CSV files or something similar, as they are simple and orderly (from a programming point of view). You would need to worry so much less about what you could and couldn't do with the XML. Plus XML is only important if you want to do special formatting. No point using a cannon to kill a mosquitoe. CSV would be simple and easy, as you would only need to export and import in order, which requires much less research on Wonko's part. What is better or worse depends on the problem at hand, no? You could say C is far better than Prolog, but Prolog can do rule-based AI with much less effort and code. So I would personally suggest that Wonko not make things more high tech than necessary. Simplicity is best. He is after all, only going to export and import values from his spreadsheet.

As for Excel, true, you can do a lot with Excel, but I was just mentioning that it would have been so much simpler with Access and VBA had that been the platform that was used from the beginning. However, at this point, it would take a lot of effort to shift to a different platform, although it is still possible to use VBA in Excel as well. It's just that a database would have made life a lot easier, that's all.

 

[deleteme123456]

What you can effectively do for an export is create a macro that copies all the user input to a new blank sheet (or a hidden sheet, effectively) in a specified order, then just execute a "Save as ... CSV" using Excel's built-in funcitons. The macro should be able to handle that, might even throw the save dialog. Import then is just telling Excel to get data from an external file, then copy the data that was just obtained back to the correct locations throughout the spreadsheet. Tedious to write but simple to understand.