Using A Spreadsheet for Outlining and Brainstorming

[Rockweaver]

i used MS Word for the outline and OneNote for my notebook to keep all my odd thoughts in.
OneNote became part of MS Office in the 2010 edition prior to that it was a add on you had to pay a mint for.

this is the link to the MS site for the product
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
i started using this for work and it took me about 3 weeks to see how it could help with my book project.
now its not for everyone and i don't make a dime for telling you about it. but it is a good tool for you to know about.

[etcetc]

This Excel tip is a revelation. I use Scrivener for writing - but since reading this thread a few days ago I've been trying out the excel method for outlining a plot, characters, etc, and I've made more progress in three days than I did in three weeks before that. I guess structure works for me... So - thank you!

[halley]

So there is openoffice.org and there is another spreadsheet program that is escaping my mind presently, that I like. I've heard of libreoffice, which must have a spreadsheet too. hmmmm

@Gault: I don't see how the spreadsheet allows for changes, like when they got married, and it only refs the present day this way, so I guess, the life span of each nominal character will get their own excel page...

I use notepad++ because it allows me to have tabs, loads of files loaded at once, and also doesn't mess with the formatting. I can't stand copying and pasting from word or browser only to get added fonts and colours. Think I've given it a good go, and it has still stayed. I can't imagine going back to Notepad or Word. xx

After editing this a few times I now find the paragraphs with html code.

[Medievalist]

Originally Posted by halley

So there is openoffice.org and there is another spreadsheet program that is escaping my mind presently, that I like. I've heard of libreoffice, which must have a spreadsheet too.

Libreoffice was forked from OpenOffice; open office is no longer being updated.

Google Apps also has a spreadsheet.

[Cornelius Gault]

Originally Posted by halley

So there is openoffice.org and there is another spreadsheet program that is escaping my mind presently, that I like. I've heard of libreoffice, which must have a spreadsheet too. hmmmm

@Gault: I don't see how the spreadsheet allows for changes, like when they got married, and it only refs the present day this way, so I guess, the life span of each nominal character will get their own excel page...

I use notepad++ because it allows me to have tabs, loads of files loaded at once, and also doesn't mess with the formatting. I can't stand copying and pasting from word or browser only to get added fonts and colours. Think I've given it a good go, and it has still stayed. I can't imagine going back to Notepad or Word.

After editing this a few times I now find the paragraphs with html code.

[@Hally]

See the top of this thread posts 6, 7 and 8, where I included screen shots from the Excel spreadsheets that I have used.

Each character (or event) has a line, with the birth date, marriage date and death date in different columns.

There is 1 cell in the spreadsheet that contains the "current date" - from this, you can calculate the person's age as of the current date and also the person's age (if they have died) from DEATHYEAR - BIRTHYEAR.

You could include a column that calculates how old the person was when they got married, if you felt that was important.

The great part about a spreadsheet is "what if" - You can easily adjust the birthdates of both man and wife until the man is 20 when he marries the girl that is 18.

I also have another page that shows all of the same dates where each column is a different year and the character's life is shown from the BIRTHYEAR to the DEATHYEAR (or CURRENTYEAR if still alive). This makes it easy to show the relationships between characters. For instance, The uncle was 70 when the grandson was born. If I move the uncle's birthdate to 5 years later, I can see that I need to adjust the grandson's birthdate by the same amount to keep the story correct. If I change the MC's birthdate and thus he is now married when he is 9 years old, I can adjust various other dates to correct the problem.

These techniques give you a big picture of the characters in your story. It would be easy to include text like this in your story (which I think adds a little to the realism of the story):

* John was 19 when he first met Sally. They were married a year later, when John was 20 and Sally was 19.

* John's mother was 49 years old when he was born. His father died when John was 2. His mother was remarried 2 years later when John was 4.

* John and his cousin, Mary, were 5 years different in age. There parents were the same age. Their grandparents both died in the same year.

A lot of these types of things would be more difficult if the writer didn't commit some of these dates to paper (or an Excel grid). If the reader says, "Wait a minute, that would have made the man 3 years old when he was married", that would be a major blunder -- and COULD happen if you change one date without noticing how it impacted other dates or characters in your story.

I don't use a separate page for each character in Excel, but I do have a separate character biography in Word at the end of the story. This helps me keep track of my different character traits, at least until I get to know them.

NOTE: I have used NotePad++ (which I love, BTW) while working on parts of my story, but the main thing is in Word so I can use formatting, Table of Contents, word counts, page counts, pictures, footnotes, etc. I can have several files open and size them on the screen to include more than one at a time, then copy/paste between them as needed.

NOTE: If you are copy/pasting text from Word or websites directly into Excel you can avoid all of the formatting problems if you use EDIT | PASTE SPECIAL | TEXT ONLY.

An alternate method is to paste it first into NotePad and then copy/paste it from there into Excel.

I hope this helped.