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Jul 3, 2013 0:38:10 GMT -5
Post by wetdirt on Jul 3, 2013 0:38:10 GMT -5
Well, I've been vaguely thinking about it all spring, and finally today I did it. I wrote a word processor in Excel. It has almost 3 features: word count by paragraph, a spell checker that lists the words that Word's dictionary doesn't recognize, and an easy way to track a day's writing.
Each chapter goes on its own tab, conveniently labelled Chapter x, and there can be tabs for notes or timelines or whatnot. The macros feature *push buttons* to run them.
Wheeeee. Excel for Nano! I'm a rebel, that's what.
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Jul 3, 2013 7:05:21 GMT -5
Post by dalaimama2 on Jul 3, 2013 7:05:21 GMT -5
Hah awesome!! Sometimes all we really need is simple. Some of the programs I've tested in the past have just too many features.
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Jul 3, 2013 12:30:08 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by mllersil on Jul 3, 2013 12:30:08 GMT -5
This is great! Congratulations!  |
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Jul 4, 2013 0:10:43 GMT -5
Post by gitchel on Jul 4, 2013 0:10:43 GMT -5
Wow. Personally, I hate excel almost as much as access ;-)
Had to be proficient in both in college. Almost sued the school for civil rights violations. ;-)
On the other hand, my boss is a devout excel-head AND a frustrated fiction writer. She'd definitely find it awesome.
When you're done, does it just export a tab-delineated text file? That would kinda rock.
Jeff
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Jul 4, 2013 1:21:19 GMT -5
Post by wetdirt on Jul 4, 2013 1:21:19 GMT -5
I could set it up to export everything at the push of a button, but it's so easy to select and copy from a column that it never occurred to me to bother. The text is all in one really wide column and each row is a paragraph. You can just copy it as a column and paste it into a blank Word document and add formatting. But it's trivially easy to write a macro that copies the column and opens a notepad file and drops it in and saves it with whatever name you want, or the name of the sheet plus the project, like, for my story, Book1chapter1.txt
I had to do a special version for home because I'm on Excel97 and it is missing a couple parsing commands that Windows 2010 has got.
And I'm also proficient in Access, and also the dreaded ArcGIS. But Excel's my buddy. I even have a sheet with a hack-n-slash mini RPG in it.
Also, if I have Excel open at work on my desk, nobody thinks a thing of it, so I can sneak notes into my story at work to clean up when I get home.
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Jul 8, 2013 18:44:09 GMT -5
Post by r.elena.t on Jul 8, 2013 18:44:09 GMT -5
'fraid I'm with Jeff on excel (and access), but that still seems totally awesome, wetdirt. I wrote my Master's thesis on a mainframe before PCs were invented... or at least available. Each sentence went on its own, numbered line set for ease moving them around. Each line had 80 columns. So you wrote editing commands by line & column, not unlike your excel writing program. What was cool is that you could play poetic games with the text after it was written - say, moving all letters in columns 6 to 13, lines 41 to 56, down 3 lines. |
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Now, where did I leave off at?
My latest edition of Straight From Thecliff Chamber 