Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion

Jenna wrote: "Timelord Iain wrote: "If it's like last year, it'll be very last minute... I haven't even heard if all 4 mods are sticking around as Team Leaders... or mod pairings are changing... or Angela is tag..."

Looks like you made the right decision with Anni just signing up...

I put in a couple hours of work, and think I'm about half done with the critical stuff...

"Blue Team" is done, except for me... already did Paula's sheet, which made copying it to re-add Anni to the competition easy... and I made all the changes to Sha's sheet so I could copy it for Melissa and Narilka (the one "Red Team" member I finished already)...

Speaking of Sha's sheet, I have no idea what the Genre column was supposed to do in the monthly section... the formula made no sense, really, and clearly didn't work anyway, since I went and checked 2020 and the numbers were all 0%... so I changed it to the formula in my sheet, that tells you how many different genres you read each month... a cooler formula would be to say you read 50% Fantasy in January, 45% Sci-fi in February, etc (most read genre each month), but would require a pretty big formula to pull off... and we've learned in the past that going overboard with formulas causes lag as the year progresses...

ALSO... Sha's freeform genre pie chart has no protection against having too many genres... if you have more than 12 or so genres, it's going to start running into the point formulas for your first couple books... only way to fix this, is to lock in a dozen or so genres and create a dropdown, or add a punch of extra columns to the side, and move the chart over (or copy Virginie's layout and move the sheet down a couple hundred rows to the bottom)... just a heads up, for now...

Other than that, I still need to fix/update the "Red Team" sheets, and look at the couple requests... might be Tuesday/Wednesday before I get to that... we'll see...

Other than that, the main other thing I'd like to look at is adding a "-/0 star" rating to the ratings column, for DNF tracking, as per Virginie's suggestion I found... DNF tracking has been all over the place in the past...

Making Short/Novella/Novel/Tome tracking easier to modify, is a nice idea, but it would mean add yet another row/column somewhere...

Timelord Iain wrote: "Jenna wrote: "Timelord Iain wrote: "If it's like last year, it'll be very last minute... I haven't even heard if all 4 mods are sticking around as Team Leaders... or mod pairings are changing... or..."

Haha, I saw the comment here and thought that I have to take that chance :)

Paula wrote: "I'm new in this but I've taken a look at the 2020 tracking sheet and if it's no bother I would like to have a tracking sheet like Anni but with another graphic that shows the genres. and about the ..."

Awww, I take that as a compliment :) I hope you don't read graphic novels tho, because I removed that part from my tracking completely.
I thought if I read one (which is rather unlikely), I could still enter the 1/4 numer of pages by hand.

haha, yeah, I liked your sheet. I don't really read graphic novels so that's okay

Back to fiddling... finally fixed some things in my own sheet... only to find out that I think Virginie used my sheet and her own as templates for moving competition tallies to the Participant Data sheet, so there was no need for duplicate data display on personal sheets...

Oh well... maybe later I'll consider that, or she can return and implement if she wants...

For now, my sheet is done, which means I duplicated it for Soo, finally...

So much more work left to do... got 5 returning players to add to my to-do list, the 10 red team members I haven't done... then I need to update the templates and find out if Solseit, Laura, and Lucija want Basic/Monthly templates or a copy of someone else's sheet...

And MOD SPOILER ALERT, (view spoiler)[Mods are leaning towards a return to 4 teams, so it stays fun even if one team pulls ahead (hide spoiler)], so there's a bunch of work to do to the Main Page, too... gonna try and do it all today, tho...

Good work, Iain! お疲れ様！🍵

And yes, I am excited by these spoilery leanings. I approve. :)

30/30 for returning members...

Need Solseit/Laura/Lucija to check in on sheet preferences...

Gonna fiddle with updating templates/etc and DNF integration, then check back...

And I think I have some ideas for recoloring sheets when teams are picked...

Getting more comfortable making big changes with copy/paste, as I go along...

BUGS: There seems to be something wrong with Iniya's publication date graph... hopefully she/Manju can look at it, since they have duplicate sheets, basically... and Manju's works...

Melissa wrote: "Good work, Iain! お疲れ様！🍵

And yes, I am excited by these spoilery leanings. I approve. :)"

Me too! :)

Thanks, Iain, for all the work you do for it.

I have new ideas I want to use on my tracker. Woo!

Ah hi, sorry for not replying earlier, it's been a couple of crazy days in Croatia, with earthquakes going on and all that

I haven't had the time to properly look at the spreadsheet, but I'd be fine with the simple template, thanks

Soo wrote: "I have new ideas I want to use on my tracker. Woo!"

I bet... spreadsheeting is addictive... I'm probably gonna move my graphs to the bottom and fiddle a bit more, after the sheet is complete and the competition has started...

Lucija wrote: "Ah hi, sorry for not replying earlier, it's been a couple of crazy days in Croatia, with earthquakes going on and all that

I haven't had the time to properly look at the spreadsheet, but I'd be f..."

Thanks... I added you to the sheet, and couldn't resist fiddling a bit more...

I'm calling it basically done for 2021, at this point... 31/33 players added & updated... all the changes to formulas & the front page done...

All that's left is official teams and a couple quick changes on New Year... the big thing left is recoloring everyone to their team colors...

I'm going to release the spreadsheet into the wild... the mods can go ahead and create a 2021 spreadsheet thread when they want, and archive this one...

Here's the spreadsheet link, for people that want to start fiddling around and planning their January reads or anything... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

The current teams listed were purely for testing... just like everyone has 1-2 books to create rankings/points...

Ah nice!! Thanks for all your hard work Iain!

It seemed like alot of work going in... especially when I considered not participating this year... but it grew on me over time... that desire to keep fiddling...

By the end I started having more ideas to fully fool-proof the process... I really want to get it to where all the information is in the same place on every custom sheet... to do that, I think I need to create a new hidden top row that can be quickly fixed whenever someone adds rows/columns to their sheet...

Right now, the hardest part about adding people to the competition is how many special cases there are on the participant data sheet...

You mean our requests for the super sheet? lol

I love my new sheet. Thanks Iain!

Soo wrote: "You mean our requests for the super sheet? lol"

No... when people modify their sheet, the important stats stop being in G1, I1, K1... and then me and Virginie went into the Participant Data sheet and fixed it to grab the right data... which is FINE... except it makes it harder to add people and copy formulas to get them setup...

So it would be great if I could modify all the sheets with a hidden row, so that the data is secretly still in those spots, even if those cells are just copying shifted cells from adding Genre columns and Death Toll columns and Re-read Columns to the sheet...

Then I'd just need to fix THAT any time it breaks, instead of creating uncopyable formulas in the Participant Data sheet...

At this point, about 20% of people have Simple Sheets, 40% have basic Monthly sheets, and 40% have super custom sheets... even those aren't as bad as they sound, since most people get ideas from one another...

Me and you have the same sheet, basically... Sha, Narilka, and Melissa have the same sheet... Manju and Iniya have the same sheet... etc... still means there's like a half a dozen different locations for things... and Yanique is one of those special sheets, and she's alphabetically at the bottom of the Participant Data sheet, where new players are added before I re-sort the sheet by teams and player names...

Woah, is that the teams? Is it official? =)

Don't want to start fiddling around with my sheet until all updates for next year's challenge is done.

Woo! My page looks great. I can't wait to work on it.

Soo wrote: "Woah, is that the teams? Is it official? =)

Don't want to start fiddling around with my sheet until all updates for next year's challenge is done.

Woo! My page looks great. I can't wait to work ..."

Nah... that was me just evenly spreading everyone out for testing... if you look, the teams are partially alphabetical, since I just split the old teams in half...

I expect the official teams to be announced later today, or really close to midnight tonight, I guess... they usually try to make teams with a chance of a close competition... so I expect mine and your teams to be smaller than the rest...

Nothing stopping personal sheet customization tho...

I already started! Bwahahaha

I may have to ask you a few questions. Will let ya know. =)

Timelord Iain wrote: "Soo wrote: "Woah, is that the teams? Is it official? =)

Don't want to start fiddling around with my sheet until all updates for next year's challenge is done.

Woo! My page looks great. I can't w..."

Hello everyone.
I have been out of it for a while, came down with COVID, but am good now.
Thanks Iain for all your work.
With the new teams, are we going to get an announcement, and I assume we will have team discussion groups.
Thanks again.

Glad you recovered, Frank!


Iain, if I get rid of the Publication row, will that mess up my sheet? If I don't want to drag it to the end because I think that would mess up the Total Columns at the top.

Soo wrote: "Glad you recovered, Frank!


Iain, if I get rid of the Publication row, will that mess up my sheet? If I don't want to drag it to the end because I think that would mess up the Total Columns at th..."

It would be easier to change it to something else... it's removable, but requires a fair bit of work manipulating the top 2 rows and maybe the Participant Data sheet...

Is there any other stat you'd like to track?... the Death Tally from Sha's sheet sounds fun... I kinda want to work that into my sheet somehow...

I'm just going to leave it blank. I may poke your brain to see if it's possible to re-order the columns. If I can figure it out and not break the formulas, I'll do it. Don't want to make more work for you.

The current order doesn't make sense for my brain because I'd order slightly different. But! I can just deal with it. If it bugs me a lot, that should push me to figure out how to make changes. lol

Soo wrote: "I'm just going to leave it blank. I may poke your brain to see if it's possible to re-order the columns. If I can figure it out and not break the formulas, I'll do it. Don't want to make more work ..."

Honestly, some of the ordering was just what was easiest to implement, vs what made the most sense...

Re: removal... you need to enmerge some stuff at the top, delete column or just hide maybe, make sure the changes don't leave stuff unreadable at the top, and then shift some formulas on the Participant Data sheet by one letter... the roughest part is how different stuff merges in different ways at the top...

The easiest thing might be to just merge the Genre and Pub columns all the way down... wipe the pub column header and formulas in the month headers first... I think there may be a way to do this in only a couple click... merging F17+G17:F1400+G1400...

EDIT: There is... just merge the 2 cells in a blue row and a white row, then highlight the 2 rows (4 cells, now 2 cells), and drag using the the little buttony looking thing in the bottom right corner... drag down, you need to stop at month rows with formulas... only dragging a single row will screw up the alternating row coloring... dragging 2 rows maintains the coloring...

I had this grand plan to use the grouping tool for my lists of Audible Plus, KU R&L, Library & etc but I forgot the grouping doesn't work well with dragging rows. Which is why I always grouped my months is over and I finished reading for that time period.

I copied over what I needed to from 2020 tracker to 2021. I need to re-organize my lists & chucking the grouping idea because it won't work well if I move rows around.

LoL - I wonder how much I'll get in this year? I'm thinking I'll be closer to 300 than anything else.

Soo wrote: "I had this grand plan to use the grouping tool for my lists of Audible Plus, KU R&L, Library & etc but I forgot the grouping doesn't work well with dragging rows. Which is why I always grouped my m..."

If you only read 300 books this/next year, I think you already have like 500 in your sheet TBR already...

It's good to have options! =D lol

The 2021 teams are up and this thread will be archived when Iain posts a new topic with the 2021 spreadsheet!

Jenna wrote: "The 2021 teams are up and this thread will be archived when Iain posts a new topic with the 2021 spreadsheet!"

Didn't realize that was on me... I posted a link a few days ago... made a thread now...

Timelord Iain wrote: "Jenna wrote: "The 2021 teams are up and this thread will be archived when Iain posts a new topic with the 2021 spreadsheet!"

Didn't realize that was on me... I posted a link a few days ago... made..."

Ah sorry, I should have messaged you that. I thought it would be better so you can put whatever you need in the initial post and edit it if you have updates. :)

I'll archive this thread now.