Spreadsheet questions for constructing fretboard diagrams

[Eric]

Hi all,

A while ago, I started a home-made spreadsheet to try to help me with fretboard visualization, along with polishing some of my Excel skills. The file is here:

http://www.box.net/shared/uyc6tbi8gf

I've been working on it in Open Office 3.0, so please excuse me if there are some formatting burps. My question is this:

The punchline in here at the current time is the fretboard based on key, like the 'G major fretboard.' The only way I could find to automate this by punching in a new letter was to use the INDIRECT function, which, if I'm remembering correctly, takes a string and converts it to a cell designation. This, coupled with a concatenation operator (&), lets me point the spreadsheet to the correct chromatic scale above.

This is a big pain in the butt and not very maintainable. Is there an easier way?

Please forgive me if this is super-stupid and childish in your opinion; I am interested in automating this stuff and learning some simple programming, but I'm still getting my feet wet. If there are any overhauls you can suggest that would make the ENTIRE thing easier, I'm all ears/eyes.

[Eric]

Anyone? Hello?

[marnold]

Hi Eric,

I've got OOo3 and will eventually get around to trying this. I just got back from a conference so I'm trying just to get back on track right now. It's on my radar. I'm no Excel programmer, beyond really simplistic things.

[aeolian]

I downloaded your spreadsheet and look a brief look at it. I am not sure what you are trying to do with this; are you trying to find an easy way to highlight the fretboard notes for any kind of scale?

Several years ago I created an Excel spreadsheet to help me figure out possible chord fingering shapes (which is a different purpose than yours, I think) and I came up with this:

http://home.comcast.net/~kitn13/photos/fretb.jpg

The problem is that it is tied to a fixed key (I think that is also your problem). It is still usable because once I figured out a fingering pattern I can get the same chord in a different key by moving my shape.

[Eric]

I downloaded your spreadsheet and look a brief look at it. I am not sure what you are trying to do with this; are you trying to find an easy way to highlight the fretboard notes for any kind of scale?

I'm trying to create a map of various patterns (major scale, arpeggios, root notes, etc.) along the fretboard in a given key. The issue is in changing keys. I can do it by changing the number next to the highlighted letter -- if you wanted it in C, you would change the letter to C and update the number to the row above corresponding to C, which in this case would be 10.

The way in which this works, however, is very very cumbersome. Functionally, it works fine as described above, but creating new patterns is a pain in the tookus, as you then have to edit that giant if-or statment. I'm looking for a better way to do this.

[Eric]

Hi Eric,

I've got OOo3 and will eventually get around to trying this. I just got back from a conference so I'm trying just to get back on track right now. It's on my radar. I'm no Excel programmer, beyond really simplistic things.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

BTW, you don't need OO3 to open it -- I saved it as .xls, so any spreadsheet program should work.