Alicornutopia

I will certainly add anyone to the sheet who is interested, just leave your email here, pm it to me, or email me (rayketh@gmail.com) once there's more people added I'll pass invite powers around too. I can't seem to add people from my phone but once I have access to my computer later today I'll do that.

I'm not sure if there is a way to denote that anyone's input supersedes others (Alicorn and kappa), I've only used google drive for collaboration stuff with one or two people before. Does anyone know if it's possible?

I'm a terrible person to ask about spoilers as I tend to not mind them ever, so I'll leave that decision to other people.

I don't think it's really necessary to denote that anyone's input supersedes others, but it seems like it would be handy for people to be able to look up in the revision history whether particular edits came from author interference or not. ^^

Found how to add people. Everyone who has contacted me about being added so far should be in now.

...Actually, before you get too far into this, I have a suggestion... XD

In the spreadsheet we keep for our personal reference, the list of active templates gets long enough that it can take a while to load or sort. I can only imagine that yours will be even worse than that, because you're giving daemons their own rows and keeping all templates on a single page. I've been toying with the notion of converting my and Alicorn's spreadsheet to the new Google Sheets, which are blazingly fast in comparison (I tested it already by making a copy of the sheet). You might want to consider moving everything to a new-style sheet before it gets too massive and unwieldy. XD

Other suggestions you are free to ignore:

• I find that it's really convenient to be able to sort the template sheet by various things like world and template and moiety, according to whim. I've just tested this by playing with a copy of your sheet, and it turns out that those borders you have between template blocks in the first column of the first sheet get absolutely screwed to hell by sorting the sheet a few times in succession. You might want to consider replacing them with a different formatting convention.
• For example, the way we do it is that the whole row for any member of a particular template gets a background colour that's mostly-unique to that template. (A few templates share colours with each other, but so far this has mostly not resulted in very much confusion.) You might prefer to only colour the template column itself that way, or do something else, I dunno.
• Also, take it from me: any formatting that takes deliberate upkeep, like the way you have purple nicknames coloured purple and green ones coloured green, is a complete and utter pain to maintain. I prefer to use Conditional Formatting where possible - in our sheet, the moiety column is conditionally formatted so that purple-moiety entries are coloured purple and green ones are coloured green. Unfortunately, the formatter isn't quite clever enough to colour the cells of one column based on the contents of another... but I'm in the middle of testing the formatter in the new Google Sheets, and it looks like with sufficient wizardry, it can do that. :D
• You may find that the upkeep of the "All Green Templates", "All Purple Templates", etc. sheets becomes a pain after a while, but I don't know what alternate solutions you might want to pursue, or if you're collectively willing to just tough it out and copy-paste a lot to update the entries. XD

*later edit* This conversation from the GDoc chat pane seems relevant:

me: Man, I really wish I could sort this spreadsheet without completely screwing up the borders.

Matthew Cutler: It’s probably best to just remove the borders… maybe the template column could be moved to the left and then added to the frozen pane / whatever Google calls it.

me: I was thinking that, but I didn't want to completely steamroll the established formatting conventions. XD
If it were up to me, though, it would go template - nickname - (end of frozen pane) - full name - world. And optionally with moiety hanging around nearby.
Probably this conversation should go in the forum thread. *puts it*

(I am the Matthew Cutler in the quote in Kappa’s post.)
I’ll also add that I think the username column should be near the start too.

how do you navigate the spreadsheet without a mouse? When I loaded the page, I tried to scroll around using the arrow keys, but I couldn't.

(my mouse broke yesterday. i cannot afford to replace it, so i am doing keyboard navigatino for nowk.)

Did the arrow keys move your cursor from cell to cell? If so, moving focus to a cell outside the visible area of the screen should scroll you automatically. If not, something is wrong and I have no idea how to fix it.

the arrow keys don't change anything on the screen at all. don't move me rfom cell to cell or do anything at all... all of the cells seem to be "read only" even though i am logged in to a google account.

wait, i thought of something else i can try: if i press ctrl-0 space and then move the mouse's scroll wheel (the buttons and wheel still work) then it lets me scroll vertically. this is a great improvement (if i don't press ctrl-0 space before trying to move to scrollwheel then it doesn't scroll). good thing i thought of that.

i can only see columns a-j. and there is no way to scroll horizontally. hopefully there aren't more columns.

(mostly including this information in case anyone else has a mouse break in the future and needs to look at a spreadsheet on google docs)

If there's a way that i could to export to csv so i can download it and read it on my computer, that would be optimal (but i would want to wait until it is finished first, and my mental spreadsheet is good enough most of the time.)

Kappa wrote:How much spoiler should the All Template sheet contain - should I, say, rename the Circle Sherlock and Tony to the names they will have after Circle is rebooted again? (The fact that Circle will be rebooted again is, I hope, not too much of a spoiler for this forum. XD) And should I add in templates you haven't seen yet and characters from worlds that don't yet exist? I guess the presence of Cape characters argues that I should... XD[/list]

I'm of the opinion that maximum spoilers just means less editing later when the info becomes common knowledge, so I'd say yes.

Kappa wrote:

• I find that it's really convenient to be able to sort the template sheet by various things like world and template and moiety, according to whim. I've just tested this by playing with a copy of your sheet, and it turns out that those borders you have between template blocks in the first column of the first sheet get absolutely screwed to hell by sorting the sheet a few times in succession. You might want to consider replacing them with a different formatting convention.
• For example, the way we do it is that the whole row for any member of a particular template gets a background colour that's mostly-unique to that template. (A few templates share colours with each other, but so far this has mostly not resulted in very much confusion.) You might prefer to only colour the template column itself that way, or do something else, I dunno.
• Also, take it from me: any formatting that takes deliberate upkeep, like the way you have purple nicknames coloured purple and green ones coloured green, is a complete and utter pain to maintain. I prefer to use Conditional Formatting where possible - in our sheet, the moiety column is conditionally formatted so that purple-moiety entries are coloured purple and green ones are coloured green. Unfortunately, the formatter isn't quite clever enough to colour the cells of one column based on the contents of another... but I'm in the middle of testing the formatter in the new Google Sheets, and it looks like with sufficient wizardry, it can do that. :D
• You may find that the upkeep of the "All Green Templates", "All Purple Templates", etc. sheets becomes a pain after a while, but I don't know what alternate solutions you might want to pursue, or if you're collectively willing to just tough it out and copy-paste a lot to update the entries. XD

I'm all for this - switching to the new sheets, putting template in the frozen pane, using background colors instead of borders, and using conditional formatting from the moiety column to maintain the colors. The borders are a huuuge hassle, and kindof ugly, and I was the one who put them in. If other people don't mind background colors, I'd strongly prefer them!

Oh also: do people think it would make more sense to have columns for daemon name/species/etc, rather than daemons as their own rows? I started putting daemons as their own rows because of Ansharil, but given that we know what a lot of people's daemons would be if they had them, it might make more sense to have daemon columns.

Man I hate the borders as well. They hurt my soul.