ADLG Spreadsheet Hell

Introduction

My love of a good spreadsheet and a pretty data table has become far more widely known than I ever imagined. Recently, it led me into attempting something I don't normally do. It was true test.

I was asked to repair a spreadsheet from a UK competition. It wouldn't pass the online tests required before its inclusion in the Art de la Guerre (ADLG) database. The organisers had cut and pasted data leading to all sorts of errors on testing.

Checking the data for a five game event with 32 players was a task and a half! I also discovered that xls files produced by non-Microsoft programs invariably fail the online tests with multiple errors, suggesting differing file headers as the source of the problem.

One Million Views!

Overnight this blog joined the millionaire's club and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's visited the site since 2007 and issue a special "thank you" to my regular readers.

I'd also like to thank all the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other third world bot networks that helped me reach this milestone.

Onwards and upwards!

Blogger Workflow

Background

Back in the mists of time I used to write my own web pages in a simple text editor then upload them to a web server by FTP. Later I graduated to a more complex editor and added CSS to my repertoire.

None of this was really required when I started blogging in 2007 with Blogger. However, I began to find Blogger's WYSIWYG editor increasingly difficult to control. I switched to editing the "raw" HTML to get a consistent look.

Until recently, I would write a blog item directly in Blogger's HTML editor. I only switched to the WYSIWYG view for spell checking and final proof reading.

Speed, or rather the lack of it, kills

At the beginning of this year I became increasingly frustrated with Blogger's HTML editor. Not because it's a bad editor, I actually really like it, but because it distracts me.

I get tied up with HTML tags rather than writing. To speed things up I have some keyboard shortcuts that add paragraph tags and the like. Despite this, writing was still slower than I'd like.