Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion

We are officially launched!

Please bookmark the following link as you'll be using it....for 10 straight months!

2019 Fantasy Buddy Reads - Tracking System

Highly recommend going to your personal tab and bookmarking from there so you directly load your own sheet rather than have to scroll through the whole thing.

This year we do have an alternative if you do not wish to mess with the sheet or in addition to the sheet if you're on a phone and don't want to have the load thing. Just use this handy-dandy form. The data you enter will go into a special sheet right in the workbook to be added into your points totals!

Handy Dandy Book Entry Form Bookmark me too!

Please go to the Primer tab first to get started. Any questions, Virginie, Iain, or myself can help you out right here.

Special thanks to Virginie who did the lion's share of the work this year and thanks to Iain who took my idea with the form and ran with it to make it happen.

Got it! Good job, gang!

Virginie! I think my sheet broke, lol. I swear, all I did was change colours, but now, publication data doesn't seem to be working.

Alright. Not sure what went wrong, but it's fixed :)

Awesome job!!!!

Thanks for doing this for us. It looks great.

Random question - do you all prefer the sheet grouped by the team with leader first and then alphabetically by the team or just purely alphabetically?

We did the former last year (and have it set that way for this year) but is that the best way?

I like it the way it is.

It hardly matters... as long as you bookmark the spreadsheet while on your own page, it'll open to your tab every time... I prefer the teamed grouping, myself, for if I want to start looking at other people's tabs...

The green theme color makes my eyes bleed. It looks like puke. Bleh. I just won't spend too much time on it. lol

Soo wrote: "The green theme color makes my eyes bleed. It looks like puke. Bleh. I just won't spend too much time on it. lol"

You/we can change the colors... last year, just the team name was color coded... and half the players had personalized color schemes...

I'm not particularly a fan of my default one either... I think I liked the blue one the best, of the 4 starter schemes...

Diana already started recoloring...

Spreadsheet looks great. Thanks for doing the work Rob, Virginie and Iain.

I just looked at your cause of Manju's post. Ha!
How will it compile which books you read when for the months and stuff? I like the setup you have at the top of your page.

Soo wrote: "The green theme color makes my eyes bleed. It looks like puke. Bleh. I just won't spend too much time on it. lol"

I wasted no time changing mine to blue :-)

I'm working on changing mine. Haha

Yup, I completely changed my color scheme. Colors and fonts make a big difference.

Yanique wrote: "Yup, I completely changed my color scheme. Colors and fonts make a big difference."

Great, have fun with it y'all.

Looks awesome! Thanks for the hardwork guys!

Looks great. I like that even the basic sheet has more granular statistics

There's a hidden column that parses the month out of the date column... so every book from Month 1 is talled for January, 2 for February, etc... this was transferred over from the threads that added this functionality mid-2018..

Also... everybody's sheet has the monthly tallies in rows 3-14... they're just grouped and hidden by default... click the + sign next to row 3 to see it... it only tallies pages/points/etc when you plug the date read into Column D... I stored that info temporarily in the author column as a Buddy Read date tracker...

Soo wrote: "The green theme color makes my eyes bleed. It looks like puke. Bleh. I just won't spend too much time on it. lol"

Haha. I wondered if the green one was too... well, green.
(but your puck is weirdly colored :O)

If cells stay green when you're recoloring, it's because they're conditionally formatted. Just hit the option (under the color palette) to change it :)

Yay, it's looking great, guys!
And lol at the rating instructions xD

Wow! It looks really really amazing. Thank you so much for creating this for us!

P.S. Virginie, it's hard to cheat when the challenge hasn't even started yet. 6.2 points already?! :P

By the way, I've marked this thread as important and unmarked the 2018 one.

I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )

Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )"

Haha I know :) If you were really trying to cheat, you would have been A LOT more sneaky!

Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )"

Good thing we hid our chitchat...

Jenna wrote: "Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )"

Haha I know :) If you were really ..."

I had 750 points for an hour or so, yesterday, until I moved all the completion dates to the author column (I copy-pasted over 100 books from my 2019 Buddy Read & New Release tracker spreadsheet)

Timelord Iain (Eeyawn) wrote: "Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )"

Good thing we hid our chitchat..."

Shhhhhh.... What was said in the chitchat, stays in the chitchat.

Oh, something I forgot to mention... The 'Main Page' tab looks locked, but everyone can write in the latest news part, and the achievement table too.

Amazing job guys. I'm probably going to prepopulate what I'm going to read as well. Last year I didn't time out books I still had going at the end of 2017 very well and got off to an awful start. Lesson learned I'm timing out several reads to finish perfectly on December 31st so it doesn't happen again.

Filter Views of the Form Calculations sheet don't work when the sheet is hidden, FYI... do we want to unhide that tab?

Went and did it :)

Rob wrote: "Random question - do you all prefer the sheet grouped by the team with leader first and then alphabetically by the team or just purely alphabetically?

We did the former last year (and have it set ..."

I like it grouped by teams, but as my name starts with A, I'm fine with the other sorting as well :D

Timelord Iain (Eeyawn) wrote: "Jenna wrote: "Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as intended :) )"

Haha I know :) If yo..."

There was also a short time when Niki and I shared the first place, I should have screenshotted it... That will never happen again I guess :D

Sir Anni wrote: "Timelord Iain (Eeyawn) wrote: "Jenna wrote: "Virginie wrote: "I would never, EVER, cheat. It wouldn't even cross my mind!

(I need some books in my sheet to control my formulas are working as inten..."

I saw that 9999 page book you "read"...

I'm watchin' you...

Hi this is the first time I've had chance to look at it on a computer rather than my phone. It looks amazing. Thank you to all the spreadsheet ninjas that worked on it.

I do have a question and I'm sorry if it is a completely stupid one (and it probably is) When you fill out the information on your personal page do you just start typing in the boxes? And once you've finished does it save automatically or do you have to do something?

Again sorry if this is a stupid question but I genuinely am a noob when it comes to this sort of thing.

I started recoloring and then decided I will wait to do all of this later. All of the talk about organizing and planning TOTALLY makes me want to do it too! I'm a planner by default. But if I plan too much, I end up wanting to buck the list and go off as a rampaging maverick. I really work best with a baseline and adaptable variants.

I'll take a gander at the different challenges and join the ones that I can do on a loose & easy to fill basis. =D

This is a group of enablers! lol

Hailee wrote: "Hi this is the first time I've had chance to look at it on a computer rather than my phone. It looks amazing. Thank you to all the spreadsheet ninjas that worked on it.

I do have a question and I'..."

Yes, the spreadsheet ninjas have set everything up for us. Go to your sheet and put in the book info (or use the form if that works better for you) and all your points will be calculated, the main sheet will be adjusted, and the new info will be saved automatically.

Soo wrote: "I'm a planner by default. But if I plan too much, I end up wanting to buck the list and go off as a rampaging maverick. I really work best with a baseline and adaptable variants. ."

I'm exactly the same. I definitely over-planned my reading in 2018 and towards the end I was clawing at the walls to have a bit more freedom. I'm definitely going to learn from my mistakes next year. A bit of planning and scheduling is fun but too much just doesn't leave you any room for reading something on a whim.

Yanique wrote: "Yes, the spreadsheet ninjas have set everything up for us. Go to your sheet and put in the book info (or use the form if that works better for you) and all your points will be calculated, the main sheet will be adjusted, and the new info will be saved automatically."

Perfect, thanks Yanique.

Soo wrote: "I started recoloring and then decided I will wait to do all of this later. All of the talk about organizing and planning TOTALLY makes me want to do it too! I'm a planner by default. But if I plan ..."

I went nuts and put in most of year's planned reading. It seems overwhelming, yet is fewer books than I've read this year. Then I started realizing there would be new releases and old books on my shelves and forced myself to add those too.

Thanks for this!

Hailee wrote: "Soo wrote: "I'm a planner by default. But if I plan too much, I end up wanting to buck the list and go off as a rampaging maverick. I really work best with a baseline and adaptable variants. ."

I'..."

I slowed down in August/September when I was gaming a bit heavily... then I went rogue in October/November... so I forgot about some BRs, then read a bunch of unplanned stuff, then I've been trying to catchup without abandoning anything, ever since... really took advantage of the fact that with the competition over, there was no 2 week deadline to start every Buddy Read, for sure...

Waw! You guys did an amazing job! I like the colors of Blood Eagles :)
In column H there is written 'audiobooks', but when you're reading physical books, do you need to delete 'audiobooks' and mention something else?

Saar The Book owl wrote: "Waw! You guys did an amazing job! I like the colors of Blood Eagles :)
In column H there is written 'audiobooks', but when you're reading physical books, do you need to delete 'audiobooks' and ment..."

It's a y/n question... or if you read & listen, you say how much of the book you listened to 25 = 25%, etc... in 2019, you get bonus points/pages for reading the book instead of listening, to compensate for how much extra reading gets done by audiophiles...

EDIT: I just loaded up the sheet, and noticed you meant the monthly summary, and not the Y/N question... Books read are already tallied in column B...

Virginie's sheet measures books by page count...

Short Stories are indicated by a new column, novellas are anything under 250 pages, tomes are books over 600 pages (my idea) and books are everything else... with a bit of work, we could implement some of that to your sheet, and give you a replacement statistic in place of the Audiobook one...

Okay, thanks, Iain :)

Mmmh. Since you mentioned column H, I'm assuming you're talking about the monthly stats. It's simply a statistic to indicate how many audiobooks you listened to within a month; if you read only ebooks/physical books, it'll stay at 0. You don't have to do anything :D

If you want something else tracked instead, I can help you though :)
Standalones, books above 600 pages (or under 250 = novellas), etc.

EDIT: Iain was faster :/

Saar The Book owl wrote: "Okay, thanks, Iain :)"

I edited my previous comment with ideas... if you want to track how many doorstopper tomes you read in 2019, for example...