Friday, February 25, 2011

Excel army list makers

After yesterdays post about the program Army Builder, I got a tip from a reader. He calls himself fester40k, and told me to Google up Alice40k and their army list makers.

Lo and behold; Excel army list makers for all current codexes! I hadn't even heard of these, so they could do well to market them a bit more!

I decided to check them out. However, I don't own Excel. Excel is 189 € (about 260 US$), so it's way over what I think the software is worth.  I use a Mac, and the spreadsheet software I have available is Google Documents, Numbers on my iPad and OpenOffice Calc.

Google Docs could open the Excel files just fine, but all macro-based functionality wasn't there anymore. Fail
Numbers on iPad couldn't even open the files, claiming they were encrypted. Fail
OpenOffice could open the files, but there were pretty much nothing that worked. Fail
Frustrated, I tried my old-old laptop from work that actually has Excel 2007 - Norwegian version. Unfortunately, the army list makers aren't compatible with non-english versions of Excel! Fail

I should note that Army Builder isn't even available for Mac, so that's another fail for me. I use an old windows laptop to run that software, as it isn't very demanding.

If you have an English version of Excel, try them out! As far as I can tell, they are great tools for making army lists a bit easier and quicker than with pen and paper.