Spread sheet switching program

[davidmurray]

The biggest drawback to spread sheet, or any computer generated switchlist system that I have heard of is simple.  These systems assume that instructions will be followed exactly.  Eventually someone operating on your layout will misspot a car.  If it is the same area, it might be found, if in the wrong yard, it may never move again.

 

[Hillyard]

ndbprr

 Anybody made a simple spreadsheet that picks industries for switching cars?  

 

 

Hello NDBPRR

 

 

I'll try to respond to your question. A little context or background would helpful.  

 

Is there a reason you are looking at software, as opposed to other ways of generating car demand?   Car cards and waybills seems to be popular.  You can also roll dice, or draw [modified playing cards to randomly generate demand.  

 

I am guessing you want to be able to print out a list, hence the software focus, am I right?

 

Some questionss come to mind:

What spreadsheet software do you use?

What aspects of it are you familiar with, functions, etc?

How many industries are you talking about, would they need different car types?

 

I used an excel spreadsheet as a car demand generator for quite a while. It was simple to use,  and I liked that the demand for cars/shipments came from "outside" instead of me. IIRC, it did require familiarity with random number generator, truncating, named ranges, and lookup functions.  I put it aside when I joined a yahoo group (later IO groups) where the group members request from, and ship to, the layouts of other members.  This solved the random generation issue for me.  Here's a link, if you are interested:

 

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best,

Hillyard

 

[MrMe]

cuyama

Any spreadsheet on its own probably won't do what you want. There's a very significant learning curve associated with JMRI OperationsPro, but it's open-source (free).

OperationsPro isn't hard to learn at all, if you stick to the basics until you get the hang of it. And I can't think of any of it's more advanced options that isn't "opt-in". IOW, you have to do something to invoke those options. They aren't "on" by default, so you don't HAVE to learn them.

Setting up and running a few basic trains is easy. Once you do that, you can try the more advanced stuff if you want. And it backs itself up so if you "break" it beyond repair, all you need to do is go to your last good backup. (The help makes that easy, too. Trust me, I know!)

The built-in help is excellent, there are lots of good tutorials linked to from the JMRI site and also on Youtube, etc, lots of experienced Ops users on the groups.io JMRIUSERS list, and the developer who writes most of the code hangs out there and answers questions, too.

Oh, and using Ops doesn't require DCC or a connection to the layout of any type. The computer doesn't even need to be near the layout (although that is usually more convenient...)

Give it a try! If you find that you don't like it, just stop using it. 

 

EDIT: Fixed punctuation.

[cuyama]

Any spreadsheet on its own probably won't do what you want. There's a very significant learning curve associated with JMRI OperationsPro, but it's open-source (free).

Personally, I always come back to the self-correcting benefits of car-cards-and-waybills.

Byron

[tstage]

ndbprr,

I'm moving this over the General Discussion forum because 1) I think you'll get more traffic that way and 2) it's more appropriate for that forum.

Tom

[ndbprr]

Put this here because pcs are electronic.  Anybody made a simple spreadsheet that picks industries for switching cars?  Alternately what is a good program to purchase.  Thank you.