“Undoubtedly, the EVE x Excel add-on is one of the simplest to use. However, simple doesn’t equate to easy; you need to shape your idea and figure out how to utilise all the data you’ll obtain.” orik Kado
Forget ISK, forget PLEX, the real lifeblood that flows through New Eden’s veins is split into columns and rows. Information is power, which means that organising knowledge must at least qualify as ‘heft’, and so the EVE Online community has had a long-standing love affair with the spreadsheet app Microsoft Excel. An official partnership between the developers of these apps earlier this year cemented things, and inspired us to ask Just About EVE Online to share their expert advice for using Excel to enhance your enterprises in New Eden.
So indispensable is the humble spreadsheet to EVE veterans that some of our community outright refused to share their secrets. In the words of FUN INC: “If I showed you, I’d have to kill you.” Fortunately, others were more forthcoming in response to our Excel tips bounty, and that’s allowed us to create this EVE Excel guide to help you supercharge your data management.
When to use Excel
First things first: we need to know when and where to use Excel to enhance the EVE experience. The opportunities are multitudinous, and AlexGra summarises them excellently:
“Profit Tracking 💰: For creating a spreadsheet to track mining, trading, or manufacturing profits. And for recording input costs, sale prices, and quantities to analyse earnings. Market Analysis and Trading 📈: For importing market data into Excel to identify trends in item prices. Use VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH for comparing prices and making informed trading decisions. Also, for price tracking and profit calculation. Inventory Management 📋: For maintaining an inventory spreadsheet to track in-game assets, including ships, modules, and resources. Keep tabs on what we own and their locations. Blueprint Tracking 📝: For managing manufacturing projects by listing required resources, blueprint details, and progress status. Use conditional formatting to highlight items that need attention. Route Planning 🗾: For planning efficient travel routes using Excel’s data sorting and filtering features. Calculate jump distances, fuel consumption, and estimated travel times. Fleet Coordination 🚀: For developing a fleet organisation sheet with pilot names, ship types, roles, and communication details. Keep everyone informed and organised during group activities. ISK Tracking 💸: For monitoring ISK income and expenses to maintain a healthy financial overview. Visualise your economic progress using charts and graphs. PI (Planetary Interaction) Optimization 🌐: For optimising planetary colonies. Calculate resource yields, extractor cycles, and setup costs for better colony management.”
Getting started
Before we can get to advanced Excel tips, it’s important to understand Excel’s basic functionality. Despite selling himself short - “I habitually rub dryer sheets on my brain to keep the wrinkles out, so my usage of Excel for EVE is very shallow” - Brother Grimoire lists three vital shortcuts that will save users countless hours in their quests to “git gud” at Excel while “keeping carpal tunnel at bay”. Original post
1. ‘F4’ repeats the last action
Especially useful for expediting data-input and editing, pressing F4 will repeat the last change you made in whatever new cell you have now clicked upon. Are you sporadically highlighting cells in a particular colour? You don’t need to continually return to the menu to click-and-select ‘highlight’. Simply, make your change on the first cell, click the next cell, then press F4.
“This one is huuuuuuge.”
2. ‘ALT’ + ‘=’ inserts the SUM function
Excel can automate all sorts of complex mathematics, but the most common and helpful of them all is addition. The ‘SUM’ function will add numbers from a range of cells, and there are many ways to trigger it. Typically, you would highlight the rows or columns you wish to add, choose the cell where you want the total to appear, and either manually type ‘=Sum’ or press the AutoSum button. But Brother Grimoire suggests a keyboard shortcut alternative. After selecting your box for the total, press ‘ALT’ then ‘=’.
“The SUM function automatically completes the other functions in your block of data and then spits out the end result. This is very useful for saving time when building your industry spreadsheets.”
3. ‘CTRL’ + ‘F’ lets you find exactly what you’re looking for
‘CTRL F’ is the near-universal method of finding something specific in a document on any Windows device (‘Command F’ for Mac users). It will open up a search box in which you can type in whatever you’re looking for. It’s handy for searching 3,000-word Wikipedia entries, finding your favourite Just About article, or searching through six-page EVE spreadsheets covering your entire manufacturing operation.
“The one function to rule them all.”
Integrating EVE x Excel
Thanks to the Microsoft partnership, much of EVE players’ manual work has been streamlined. First, the EVE add-in must be installed. Schadsquatch gives a step by step guide on how to do it:
Importing your character
“Insert --→ Get Add-In --→ Search for EVE --→ Import Character --→ Enjoy having all of your character’s information added to Excel!”
Loading your assets
“Use the function ‘=EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_ASSETS()’ to load up all your assets to see what you actually have scattered across New Eden’s 5,000-plus systems.”
Visualising your assets
“Play around with the cards to create some fun tables. I’ve created a table that shows exactly how much of each item I have lying around in the major trade hubs that I actively trade in. I was surprised to discover I have over 4,000 ‘Exotic Dancers, Male’ waiting for me in Jita for some unknowable reason.”
Finding important information
“The most important button to click is ‘type’, which will appear when hovering over an item. You can gather even greater amounts of data, such as volume and average price, about whatever EVE thing you wish to sell or trade.”
Granted, for those whose high-school IT classes feel an eon ago, some of this is hard to understand without visualisation. Fortuitously, Schadsquatch included a link to a work-in-progress Planetary Interaction spreadsheet which keeps track of each of their capsuleer’s gains from each planet inside their C5 wormhole.
“This helps me keep track of what I’m pulling, and where the choke points are.”
Converting time zones
Here’s where things get a little more complicated, but you’ll thank us once you’ve mastered it. We’ll start with what Melicien Tetro, a near-20-year EVE veteran, describes as their “final boss”.
“Once you think you’re getting it right, boom! You miss something because you had the time right but on the wrong day. Let’s solve that.”
With fleet members spread across numerous time zones, a mistake in conversion could result in your reinforcements showing up six hours too late to discover naught but wreckage and ruin. In Melicien Tetro’s example fix, there are three time zones sorted into columns A, B, and C: Time Zone A: GMT-6 (CST), Time Zone B: GMT, and Time Zone C: GMT+6 (OMSK).
Now say you have a fleet scheduled for 10pm GMT on August 22, 2023. That would be 4pm in Timezone A and 4am the following day in Timezone C. “Quite a difference! Yeek!”
Let’s use the simplified example of a single row, row number two, so that the cells in question are ‘A2’ ‘B2’ and ‘C3’. Make cell B2 ‘8/21/23 22:00’. Make cell A2 ‘=B2- (6/24)’. Then make cell C2 ‘=‘B2+ (6/24)’.
These formulae can then all be copy-pasted (don’t forget ‘F4’) into the other rows. And voila! No one from the Western Hemisphere turning up early to spoil your carefully planned ambush and no one from the Eastern Hemisphere missing all the action.
Building bespoke functionality
orik Kado has taken it up a notch with advice for how to shape custom, complex projects designed to maximise the utility of available data.
Excel’s advantages are optimised when combined with other third-party tools. As a lover of industry, they sought to plan their options using EVE Ref - a database of EVE items and their corresponding IDs. While its use cases extend beyond the industrial, orik Kado had a very specific goal in mind: to calculate their composite manufacturing needs including materials, number of runs necessary to acquire a specific quantity, and the approximate cost of the materials.
“I created a sheet solely to store IDs, names, and average prices of all the items needed for the process. This allows me to use one of Excel’s most beautiful and useful functions: VLOOKUP. It also keeps your main sheet more organised with the necessary information. Plus, it looks cleaner.
“With these three parameters, I’ve managed to get an approximate cost of my composites. I can see the approximate quantity of materials I’ll need and how many runs I need to execute for my desired quantity. If applicable, I can also see how much material I’ll have left over. I’ve kept it fairly simple, but it’s still possible to make it more accurate by adding more variables. However, for my needs, this is more than sufficient. "
orik Kado has shared a download link for their project if you would like to take a look at their example. The headers are in Spanish, which orik cheerfully reframes as an “opportunity to learn some new words in another language.”
However, it’s worth remembering that the add-on is not only useful for industry. “It provides an impressive amount of information for practically everything.” Whatever you opt to use Excel for, orik Kado’s words of wisdom hold true:
“Break down your idea into smaller parts. Don’t try to accomplish everything in a single formula. In my experience, it’s better to perform small operations and chain them together to achieve the desired result.”
N.B. Some text has been slightly amended for grammar and brevity. You can find the submissions in full at the *original bounty post*.
Image Credit: Razorien on Flickr
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