How do you Generate Data Files w/ Excel?

[Urendi Maleldil]

I'm not an Excel guru, but I'll use anything that will make creating mod data files faster and easier. I know people have used Excel to build some of the great mods out there.

How did you transfer Excel data into an SE4 text file?

[PvK]

Manually. I have used Excel, but mainly to figure out formulas, make balance and other calculations, and see my data side by side. Then I manually put the data into the mod files.

In other game projects I have used Excel as a template for game data, saving it as .CSV files and then programming the game to interpret the .CSV files. But I don't know how, or even if it's possible without coding a plugin, to get Excel to output in the correct format for SE4 to read.

Some other modders may have come up with clever labor-saving techniques using Excel which I don't know about. I try to use Excel only to the point where it starts becoming more work than it's worth, which for me is pretty quickly. Since Excel puts data in cells where it is annoying to see and edit, I find it to be extremely error prone and aggravating to try to do anything too complex with it. I do find it useful though for quickly doing calculations and stuff.

PvK

[Fyron]

It is definitely possible; Val used an Excel workbook with plenty of macros to generate the data files for B5 Mod directly. Unfortunately, I have lost my copy of this file.

[Azselendor]

It's not hard to make one at all, I made one once to see it it was possible. I'll have to dig it out again.

[geoschmo]

I've done it before, it's not that hard. You can save the excel spreadsheet as a tab-delineated text file (Excel does this by default when saving as a text file), then open the text file using word or some other file editor and do a find/replace and replace all the Tab characters with spaces. You can do the same thing saving it as a .csv file and replace the commas with spaces, but some of the descriptions might have commas in them. There is no place in any SE4 data file where a Tab character belongs.

It won't look exactly like a Se4 data file, but Se4 ignores spaces for the most part and just looks for the := to know where the values begin. If yo uplay with it some you can add spaces in the appropriate places and make it line up like a regular SE4 data file

[Xrati]

Here's an old excel spreadsheet that I downloaded a long time ago. It may be a little help in what you want to do. I've never used it so I don't know if it's what your looking for.

[bearclaw]

I use Excel to pre-visualize what I'm doing in a mod. lay out all the stats and such in a format that allows me to quickly see all versions of an item and adjust accordingly. Once done, I manually create the appropriate item. End result is that I have an Excel file that lists everything in the mod in an easy to read format that others can quickly read.

[Urendi Maleldil]

That's what I'm doing now for my next mod. It would just be easier if there was an automated way to get the data from the spreadsheet into a SE4 text file without doing it by hand or slogging through a hundred entries in DavidG's modder.