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Proper maintenance of game activity table
Our take
Maintaining a comprehensive game activity table is essential for tracking participation in your hobby game. Since April 2017, your monthly summaries have captured hours spent by each player, providing valuable insights into engagement. Transitioning to Excel is a great step, and your current approach using SUM functions is effective for yearly totals and all-time data. However, as you look to expand your data management skills, consider exploring features like pivot tables or data validation to enhance organization and ease of extraction in the future.
I'm part of a team of a rather small hobby game that we've been running for many years now. We've been running simple activity summaries in hours spent like this monthly, ever since beginning in April 2017. They simply go like this:
- GM Matt - 65.7h
- M Aiden - 54.3h
- K Hawk - 32.1h
- K Tell - 30.0h
- M Poe - 27.6h
- T Tribux - 25.4h
- M Vair - 24.5h
- K Rodian - 23.3h
- K Eventide - 20.1h
- T Crab - 14.4h
- M Voss- 14.3h
- M Teir - 9.1h
- M Vallin - 4.4h
- T Forrte - 0.5h
They're posted monthly so there are similar tables for May 2017, June 2017 and so forth up to April 2026.
I want to start storing them all in Excel, this is what I did so far:
The sum part for each year is simply:
=SUM(D3:L3)
and so on. Then there's a final column "ALLTIME" where I sum everything to the left except the columns with yearly sums.
This works so far, but I'm wondering if there's a better approach that's gonna be more comfortable in the future if I want to extract more data. I have zero experience with data management and Excel, this is what came intuitively to me, but I want to know if there isn't something that will bite me in the ass in the future.
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