Excel tips #1

As said before, Excel is a good tool for building character generators. In this little series, I'll try to provide some tips and hints that'll help you build your own chargen in Excel (or other spreadsheet tools). These will be varying in length and complexity.

Tip #1 Use Names for cells and areas

To make things easier for you, take the extra time to give names to your cells. It's quick, and makes your life easier when it comes to building your spreadsheet. Whenever you select a cell or an area, you can see what you have selected in a small field at the upper left of your screen (image from osx version of Excel 2008, but it's similar in Win-versions as well).

Now, with the cell or area selected, you can type in another name for that cell or area. For instance, if you have four attributes, Muscle, Brains, Cool and Speed, you can name the cells with the values Muscle, Brains, Cool and Ego as well.

You can then use that in later formulas. To continue the example above, let's say that there is a health attribute that is the sum of Muscle and Speed. Normally, you would have typed =SUM(B2;C2) or something like that to add that together. But, since we have named our cells, we can instead type =SUM(Strength, Speed) (or =Strength+Speed)

While it may not seem to make a big difference in a small example like this, when the spreadsheet grows bigger, it will make life a lot simpler. This is especially true when you start to deal with areas instead of single cells.