Oh god that formula - making spreadsheets for reporting is literally my day job and that made my head hurt.

I guarantee you there are simpler methods. For one you don’t need to have and()=true and returns true or false so if equalling true is the positive it already works. You can literally remove =true from all that.

I am not trying to rag on you, there is clearly a lot of work gone in here but you could simplify this massively.

So select column 25 and using naming call it HumanFemaleRace then name column 26 HumanMaleRace etc

Your formula then becomes =vlookup(randbetween(1,50),J21&M21&L21,1,0)

Rather than one table you name the ranges it’s going to reference

If you wanted to do it without named ranges you could instead add a header to each row of the suggested format (ie humanmalerace) then use the below formula

=index(offset(a1,50,1,1,match(j21&m21&l21, 1:1,0)),randbetween(1,50))

where a1 is the first column of the header row and 1:1 is the header row

would massively reduce the formula and make it more future proof

If you add another row belies those headers that is

=counta(a3:a503)

you could replace both 50’s in the previous formula with index(2:2, 1,match(j21&m21&l21, 1:1,0)) and then you can have upto 500 entries per column without fear of it returning blanks.

Quote from RangerDeadeye >>

Also, please share any other tools you've developed yourself that you think other DM's might find useful or interesting.

I too enjoy making stuff on excel. I've found macros a much smoother way to run the sheets, and it reduces the loading time (I once made a colossal spreadsheet which was full of formulae like yours, and every change you made to every cell took a full minute to compute!).

I've made an encounter calculating spreadsheet which lets you put in your characters for the campaign and their xp, and then the sheet works out their level. Then you tick which ones are present for the encounter and pick the monsters & quantities from a drop-down of every monster in the monster manual, and it gives you a page number for the monster, adjusted xp, and xp per player. It also lets you save the encounters and load them so you can make multiple encounters ready for use. You can then enter number of slain enemies on the list and press a button to log the xp on the players page from the encounter.

It's really sped up making encounters for the module I'm writing, as I can just put 8 level 2 characters in and tick one more each time to make encounters for 1-8 players.

I also use excel for note taking for my encounters I have planned. I have a workbook with about 100 sheets of stuff - I think it came in at about 120 pages when I copied it all to word out of curiosity! I worked out that I had turned 700 words on excel into a 16 page oneshot, so at that rate it came in at well over 1000 pages if I typed it all up in full!

My next project is a random dungeon generator, which I intend to build into an excel form. Hopefully it will not turn into an absolute monster!