Spreadsheets Galore

I am what you might call a nerd.  Not your run of the mill goofy glasses and squeaky voice nerd (though I have learned the guy at the glasses store two years ago failed to get my glasses adjusted correctly and they don't sit straight on my face).  Instead, I find myself to be a nerd semi-disguised as a “well-adjusted individual.”  Could you read that straight face, because I couldn’t even type it without giggling at its absurdity?

But seriously, I like football, chili, and cage fights.  No one could possibly think I’m a nerd.  But then you see me with all my nerd friends sitting in a game store playing Magic: The Gathering.  Cat’s out of the bag (which is bad because I’m allergic to cats).

It gets worse. I have spreadsheets.  I have one for the budget we seldom stick to, one to track my mortgage payments, a Magic 8-Ball, a Magic event record tracker (one for in-person events and one for digital games, of course). There are the inventory tracking spreadsheets I’ve created for various areas at work and the spread sheet I keep to test new excel functions, should I ever need to go back and use something I once took the time to figure out.  That one is filled with really important things like custom functions and concatenate (which smooshes multiple cells text into one).

I did a quick search... I have 595 spreadsheets at work (technically 2,144, but some are just data storage) and 181 at home.  How many do you have and are you nerd enough to even figure that out?

Did you know I once set up a spreadsheet to calculate upgrade bonuses for an entire MMORPG so I could make the best decisions when spending my hard-earned gold?  Yeah, that was the game I had to stop playing at the request of my wife because I was getting up at 3 AM to bank my gold.

It gets even worse.  I taught myself to write macros and VBA (which is apparently a semi-Excel-specific version of Visual Basic.  It all started so innocently, wanting to copy something repeatedly or add a line at the top of a page and copy in formulas.  But it was never enough.

One day I sat down with a burning question.  Could I create a button in Excel that moved my cursor to a different cell with the click of a mouse.  Apparently just clicking on the cell had become too mundane; I needed a stronger drug.

Once one button worked, it seemed obvious to create one for each of the four normal-person directions (diagonals are overrated).  The next most obvious question was whether or not I could restrict the movement to a certain area, followed by tracking where I had been, and numbering the cells in a semi-random manner.  It was almost as if I was trying to program some sort of game in Excel.

Hours and hours (and hours [and hours]) of properly nested formulas later, I have a fully functional Choose Your Own Adventure game.  Well, it’s fully functional only in a nerd’s sense of the word.  There are 225 rooms you can wander into, of which some 30 have story lines written for them.  But the programming works.  That’s enough to be considered fully functional!

Perhaps someday I will find the time and, more importantly, the inspiration to write stories for a couple hundred more rooms.  In the meantime, I am providing you a Beta test experience!  That’s right.  You can try my non-nerd created, spreadsheet-based, Choose Your Own Adventure-esque game.  So what if the story-lines repeat themselves.  Do you have what it takes to escape the dungeon, or will you find yourself dying a horrible death. There’s only one way out.  And whether you make it out or not, you can always enjoy my spectacular usage of concatenate!

Here is a link to the game.  Try it out and let me know how you do in the comments below.

Excel Choose Your Own Adventure 

(If it doesn't load on the next screen, you can click the download button.  You may have to allow macros.  Don't worry about the macros; I wrote them all myself and they are safe.)