I have a question, even though I am not through the file fully. How do you upload change stats every turn? Do you have a specific shorter method? Or is it done by hand?
I am particularly curious about turn by turn growths (such as population increase each turn) and by order growths (such as buying of military units).
It's really pretty simple. As individual stats are entered or changed the new values automatically move to the top of the sheet and then over to column G. Column G rows 13-39 are what will be posted for each nation in its final format. So when you finish updating a nation's spending, its stats are already in posting format at the top of its nation tab.
Now to make the final posting easy, I "collect" all the finished stats from each nation on the appropriate cradle tab. It happens automatically and you can see how by looking at the formulas on the cradle tabs. In addition, I added vbulletin formating (bolding, color etc.) to the cradle tab lists.
Now when the last nation is updated, all the cradle tabs are also updated and I just copy and paste the entire list into the thread. Spoiler tags can be added at any point you want them if you want to separate areas.
Now as far as keeping track of turn by turn changes within a nation, i sort of did so. If a player spent 1 EP on turn one to improve agriculture, then I entered: =1 in the cell. The next time he spent anything on agriculture, I changed the cell to: =1+X. That way I had a record of each time money was spent, even if I could not pinpoint the exact turn. If a player spent less than a whole EP the ecord might look like this: =1+.5+.25+1+2+.5.
I did similar things with troop purchases. Each purchase was added to the ongoing total and losses subtracted. Army purchases (B126) might look like this:=1000+2000-550+3000+5000-2000. Excel always does the math and shows the net number, which is automatically moved to the correct place in the stats and then to the cradle list for posting.
My goal was to only have to enter information once. Even a simple stat list with few, if any, calculations can benefit from the ability of Excel to move the data to a posting tab and save all the double entry, error prone steps of a manual system.
You could even have all your nations on a single tab in say columns A-E and then have them collected into the right format for posting and moved to column G for copying and pasting into the game thread. Excel allows you to collect many columns of cells (in the same row) into a single cell with text and punctuation. These four cells differentiated by color:
Army Costs: 1 EP buys: 1000 200 200
Become one cell ready for posting:
Army Costs: 1 EP buys: 1000-I, 200-M, 200-aUU
If I haven't answered your question, let me know.
EDIT: If a stat is autocalculated I cannot track its turn by turn changes.
