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Is the Best Free-Form Cell-Based Visual Board & Grid .... Excel ?!
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Posted by washere
Aug 13, 2020 at 03:50 PM
Andy Brice wrote:
>Just don’t put in anything that looks like a date!
That’s actually something I have to look out for, date formats, $ signs, etc. in importing notes. The extra engine can be a lunatic.
Also if releasing hp with Free-Form, you can disable it as default, then if enabled in settings or better via a top toolbar icon, a message_box can pop-up with usual disclaimer about loss of data, own risk, cards, experimental feature etc.
Posted by washere
Aug 13, 2020 at 03:50 PM
>> extra engine
Excel engine
Posted by Andy Brice
Aug 13, 2020 at 05:06 PM
washere wrote:
>Also if releasing hp with Free-Form, you can disable it as default, then
>if enabled in settings or better via a top toolbar icon, a message_box
>can pop-up with usual disclaimer about loss of data, own risk, cards,
>experimental feature etc.
Hyper Plan never changes your text (and never will!), only how it is interpreted. I think the cons of ‘helpfully’ changing someones text (ooh, looks like a date) greatly outweigh any pros.
—
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com
Posted by washere
Aug 15, 2020 at 10:18 AM
With prices of large curved monitors falling regularly, anyone can have cheap electronic walls showing large visual Boards using Excel, specially if you use more than one large monitor.
This simple link shows what typically springs to mind when we think of an Excel sheet has nothing to do with what is possible as a Visual Board as I said a few times:
https://www.google.com/search?q=excel+kanban&source=lnms&tbm=isch
This short video shows ways we can browse smaller grids or sections within the larger grid of a sheet. Just using basic simple menu/toolbar commands. More is possible w/ plugins etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuhsUNBeNHw
Beyond use as a Visual board, simply creating one’s own app is possible with dashboards:
https://www.google.com/search?q=excel+interactive+dashboard&source=lnms&tbm=isch
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Interactive+Excel+Dashboards
Posted by Amontillado
Aug 15, 2020 at 03:26 PM
I’ll confess the use of spreadsheets for outlining was quite interesting, yet initially not for me. I still think my use case for outlining is different than Washere’s, but that’s a good thing because it promotes discourse and introspection.
This morning I awoke thinking of curious discussions in Apple support forums for Apple Numbers, secure in my superior understanding of spreadsheets - and then realized with horror I couldn’t remember how the offset function works. In fact, my confidence in Numbers is based more on pleasant Dunning-Krueger than demonstrated performance.
And so I hied me to my Mac.
In my self-rescue from the mysteries of offset(), I ended up with something along Washere’s ideas.
Imagine two sheets (tabs, in Excel-speak).
The first tab has a character roster, which is a table of names in one column and a column for character notes.
It also has a plot points table, e.g., “Curly cooks pancakes, mistakes laxative for chocolate morsels.”
Each character in the character roster gets a happiness value in the plot points table. The row for Curly’s pancakes is 2 for Curly, because he’s moderately happy, and 1 for Moe, because he’s just started to smell fresh pancakes.
The row for Moe eye-gouging Curly after breakfast is 3 for Moe (ecstatic) and -3 for Curly (very unhappy).
That’s where the second sheet (tab) comes in.
It has a selector for what character to reference.
A Story table below that shows one line per plot point from the first sheet (tab), and one column per happiness value (tragedy through triumph).
Each plot point from the plot point table is distributed horizontally to happiness columns as appropriate for the selected character.
Adding a character semi-automatically adds a column to the plot points table with happiness sliders per plot point for the new character, and the new character to the character selector for the Story table.
Adding a new plot point semi-automatically adds a row to the Story table.
I got the idea thinking about Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on the shape of a story, https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ (mild cuss-jar terms used).
His GI/BE graph isn’t the same for every character in a story, and this was an attempt to reflect that.
And to learn the offset() feature in Numbers, but that doesn’t matter much. I could have just read the documentation.
I don’t know if I’ll use the template I created, but I might. Could be useful for mulling.