ceɑꞃᵹæꞅꞇ

this feels goofily vulnerable to do bc i am not...... strictly "good" at "computer". but i think that is in fact, why, i must do it. for the rest of us. who arent good at computer and yet but regardless DO in fact, computer, Noneof the less!!!!!!!!

if you're already really good at spreadsheets or other types of programming, a lot of this stuff might not be helpful to you, or it might be drastically over-explained. i'm hoping i can help people who have about as much experience as i did when i randomly started special interesting on spreadsheets a few months ago, which is essentially none (& i'm still learning all the time, so i bet parts of this will feel outdated to me like immediately, & i'll try to update it if i have any huge breakthroughs). here's my background when i started trying to do this stuff for no apparent reason, to give context:

• bad enough at learning numbers & formulas that i failed tenth grade math, then got pity-passed with a 52% on my second attempt because i got a tutor & my teacher could tell i was trying real hard
• rusty rudimentary HTML knowledge from being a very online child in the 90s/early 2000s (level: could hack together geocities/neopets pet pages)
• somehow even rustier & more rudimentary CSS knowledge from being a very online teenager+ in the late 2000s/early 2010s (level: could make my custom theme on tumblr look different, but couldn't build one from scratch)

a while after i started to get a grasp of spreadsheet formulas (which involved a lot of trial & error, as well as sitting at my computer taking three minutes to read help forum answers out loud to myself repeatedly, rephrasing them until i felt like i understood them well enough to get to the trial & error part), i ended up starting to learn some python for unrelated reasons, & found that my knowledge of spreadsheets made aspects of python easier to grasp, & then getting better at python made me better at spreadsheets, & i realised that talking to computers is stupid & fake & if you have a thing you want to do you can probably figure out how to do it & it might be wildly inefficient but it doesn't matter & then eventually maybe you'll learn how to make it more efficient & that'll be cool, won't that be cool??

i spent a few hours on this over the past few days & am now forcing myself to stop so that i finish some slightly real-er work so it will be hanging out in this aggressively WIP form for a while but i think it's got some helpful basics in there anyway so i am posting it. ok! thank you i love you bye have fun, have fun on the computer ok, that's what it's for don't let them make you forget that's whatit's for :/

satah made the truly absurdly powerful spreadsheet for PLANET FIST characters sheets that i used for basically every playtest after it was made & that i'm still in awe of, and this is such a cool resource (especially for people without a technical background) for passing on that skill! if you're curious about spreadsheet wizardy & are into TTRPG design, you should check this out.