General methods for editing a Sector with a spreadsheet
I'm having great success pinpointing various categories of planets and I thought I would share the spreadsheet steps for how I'm doing it.
When a sector is generated with Thalassogen's SectorMaker utility, I save it as a .csv file.
I open it in Excel or Open Office. I must select that all fields must be treated as "text" to preserve exactly what it says. I click the top left corner of the field diagram (that selects all rows, all columns) and set to Text. If some columns are set to general and numbers are treated as "numbers," that will cause problems because a hex designation 0101 will appear as only "101" and cause SectorMaker to hang if it's fed back there.
The .csv file has "delimiters" which are the semicolons (and only semicolons). Select "semicolon" as the delimiter so that things separated by semicolons appear in different columns.
Once the .csv is converted to a spreadsheet, the data appears under column headings. On Column 1, Row 2 (A2) select "Freeze" in the View tab, so that the column headers (Row 1) always appear no matter how far I scroll down the list, for reading convenience.
NAMING WORLDS: I can give mainworlds and non-mainworlds names in the Name column. I want to focus on naming mainworlds first (an average of about 640) to cut down on the work. To help do that, I click on the Name column, select Data -> Filter and create a standard filter where Name <> "(WORLD NAME)" This cuts out most of the non-mainworlds (except gas-giants and stars) from the list, which can be many thousands. The list is more convenient to handle that way. After I'm done I must click "remove filter".
CAPITALIZING POPULATION 1 BILLION+: Thalassogen may revise the SectorMaker to do this automatically, but for the time being I pick a column beyond a table and type in a cell on the third row "=MID(F3;5;1)" The cell fills with the fifth character of the UWP column, that is to say the Population Code. I click and drag the bottom right corner of the cell and that copies it to every other cell in that column, returning EVERY planet's population code.
A few non-mainworlds in the same hex as mainworlds with way over a billion people may top over a billion too, so if you have the Filter cutting out "(World Name)" you may miss some.
Then on that new column I created, I select Filter and ask for all rows >=9. That isolates the planets over a billion population and I manually change their names to all-capitals.
NO POPULATION: In a similar way I Filter for populations =0. If there are no inhabitants to name a planet, or very few representing explorers or such, I postulate that the mainworld still has only a planetary catalog number. In my campaign that's the Frontier Planetary Catalog, so I give it a name like FPC-312. Almost all mainworlds except most of the zero-pops in my campaign have a name.
WATER WORLDS: In a similar way I create a new column and type in a cell "=MID(F3;4;1)". This isolates the Hydrographic Code. I click and drag the bottom right corner to make the whole column. Then with Filter I ask for rows =A. For these planets, I give them "watery" names. "Neptune", too obvious! I use Oceania, Naiad, Glittersea, Blue, Shallow, etc.
HIGH LAW LEVELS: Some planets, especially if densely populated, show high Law Levels even up to G. In a similar way I create a new column, and type in the 3rd row a cell "=MID(F3;7;1) and click and drag the cell handle. With Filter I ask to isolate anything >=F. I postulate that a high Law Level creates so many hassles for merchants that the Traveller's Aid Society has marked them as Amber Zones, so I change Zone to "Y" for Yellow.
SAVE BACK AS .CSV FILE: Making sure to delete any extra columns of data, I select Save As, and .csv. I must click the option for Other Options. I must specify that the "delimiter" must be a semicolon so it will translate column-breaks only as semicolons.
