Joy of Excel

I don’t know how you could be a hardcore industrialist in Eve and not use a spreadsheet. My spreadsheet poison of choice is Excel, mainly due to the acquired skills I’ve obtained from work. With Excel, I can write macros, make api calls (this is still new to me, and is frustrating at best), use multiple advanced functions, conditional format, and do all sorts of other ‘fancy’ things. Most importantly, I’m FAST at doing these things. I set up a PI production schema in 2-3 hours that calculated the profit margins for P0-P4 and all combinations in between (P3-P4, P2-P4, P1-P4, P2-P3, etc) I can now view what could make the most money, the variance and investment associated with each potential income opportunity, and flexibility on pricing. This gives me advantage above several of the public tools, as they tend to be more limited in scope. (manufacturing up only 1 level, or figuring everything from P0 or P1, or not calculating an ROI (Higher ROI will tend to give more stable income in the face of market swings))




I wish my api was better. I can call api with macro and cycle through the desired codes, but I wish you could easily dump all Jita data from an api call into a sheet. I am not great at xml, but I feel this is the current weakness of my spreadsheet. I am doing a LOT more in Jita with PI, and I need to reconfigure my market information in Excel, which I haven’t done since Dominion release.



I searched google for Excel 2003 Eve api calls with no success. Sigh.



I may need to just focus on newer excel versions that will allow xml importing function to work properly. I also greatly prefer eve-metrics for data as opposed to eve-central; which a lot of older tools utilize. When I finally figure out a good way to do this, I’ll post; but no guarantee as to when this epiphany will finally occur.



Current method: Import External Data -> insert api call -> dump block of data -> edit out non-useful columns… repeat -> create macro to auto-update.



This seem cumbersome, and I end up with multiple blocks of data that isn’t very elegant. In everything I’ve searched, this unfortunately seems like the only way, currently with Excel 2003.