GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by kmunoz

Two things:

1) This is amazing.

2) Where did you learn to do this? After looking at your sheet I realized that if I could do something similar for my random monster generator I'd be able to make it cross-platform.

(There was a third thing that I got rid of because I'd misread your last post.)

1) Thank you.
2) Mostly, I've learned through trial and error. I learned some computer programming by going to college, and that's helped immensely in the Macros, but most of the functions of the spreadsheet itself I just googled it when there was something I wanted to do and didn't know how. A lot of the things I do that look complex are really just combinations of three or four simple tricks combined to make something more complex happen (such as the drop-down menus which can change their offerings based on other criteria you select). And, really, mostly it's just familiarity. I've been developing this spreadsheet for 7 or 8 years already, maybe longer (the oldest backup file I have is from 2011, but that was already v1.36 of the sheet). I've been messing with spreadsheets for 20 years, going back to the version of Microsoft Works I got with my first computer in 1996.
3) I saw your third point, and compatibility is something I've had in mind. In fact, largely it's why I've been rewriting the Macros for the last year or more. Last time I tried running the RC9 version of the sheet in LibreOffice it took something like 6 minutes to execute a Load/Save ship command. Last time I tested the new macros it was more like 20 seconds to (mostly) load a ship. Of course, I also pitched a ton of errors, which is one of the reasons why the rewriting has been very slow. And while that 20 seconds is kind of slow compared to the ~1.5 seconds it takes in Excel, it is at least usable speedwise.