Documentation in other than xls format?
 

A lot of the community documentation I'd like to read is in xls format and I don't have excel. I'm thinking of magic site and spell lists, for example. Do these files exist in another format? And why did they choose to do it this way?

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

Yeah, I hate that xls format too, but I'm still grateful to authors for putting this information together. You can use OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel Viewer (which is free) to view them. Unfortunately, both are about as heavy and cumbersome as Excel itself. But from OpenOffice you can resave those files into more convenient format.

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

i especially love microsoft's free excel viewer. it demonstrates how powerful the xls format is - it sure must be to take up 100% cpu usage on my 2800+...

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

As long as Dom2 is running and excel viewer is in the background it only takes 50% of CPU usage. Surely, such sophisticated format requires some maintenance...

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

I actually make my documentation natively in the Open Office format, but it has seemed like most people use Micro$ucks Office, so I've published them in the Excel format, which I absolutely, utterly loathe.

Open Office runs a bit more slowly because it doesn't have all the tie-ins and optimizations ofr Windows that MS Office has due to the same company developing the OS, but I haven't had any problems having both Dom2 and up to four OO documents open simultaneously (and I'm running an ancient Celeron 500 system). The Unit DB I made is starting to get a bit unwieldy, because it is so huge, but so far it can't be helped. It'd be nice to have it in PDF, but there is the problem of maintaining the display format because the rows are so long.

Those who want the files I at least have produced in OO format should sing out in this thread, and if there are enough, they'll be made available. The first time around when I tried distributing them in that format instead of Excel format, I got a crapload of complaints about not being able to read them, not having OO etc, so I haven't bothered since .

Edi

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

I haven't needed to use many .xls files yet, and I think OpenOffice can handle them anyway. The only time I regretted not having MS Excel was when I found out that pretender cost-counting Excel file. It used many macros, but seemed to be able to quickly compare different pretender/nation/scale/theme setups. I found it from SunrayBe's site, IIRC.

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

As a linux user, I prefer having all those files under a native OOo format.
Even the windows fellows should give a try to this software. At least, they wouldn't have to crawl the web searching for CD keys or whatever crack.

Here is the URL : openoffice.org

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

My preference goes toward OO format. Though I'd export the data into something else anyway. Btw, MySQL is nice for handling of this kind of data http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Documentation in other than xls format?
 

You can use OOorg as a MySQL frontend ... If anyone's interested I'll dig up the link ...