I have an official series bible for the Paladin League stories. I bought it from a shop on Etsy and have made tweaks that work for me and for the series, but I'm wishing I could figure out ways to improve it further.
There are a lot of things I really like about it. The fact that it had headings and tabs so that I didn't have to figure out what I needed was the biggest help, but it also had things that I never considered.
But as I'm heading into book 5 of of the series, I'm starting to run into a few issues.
For example, there's a sheet for all the characters whether they're main characters, secondary, or merely walking through. This was great! Until I got close to a hundred names.
They're kind of sorted by book, but not completely. I'd kind of like them to be alphabetized, but I'm scared if I sort the column in my Excel file that it might mess things up.
But one of the major secondary characters from Wicked Deception had another name in the spreadsheet, and I didn't see it, so I named him again. This is only going to get worse going forward.
I saw someone else selling a different series bible, but it was priced at a ridiculous cost and there was no way to look at it and see what I'd be buying. If I had a chance to take a close look at it, see how intricate it was, judge the level of Excel skills involved, I might be willing to pay that much money. But this isn't an option. The website doesn't even have the item listed to get any view of it. I only heard about it through a promotional email.
Another drawback for me is that I know Excel is powerful and the series bible I'm currently using isn't touching any of the formulas or other tools it has. It's basically just fill in the blanks. I know there has to be a way to harness some of what Excel can do. Unfortunately, my Excel skills are not as awesome as I wish they were.
So I'm using the best spreadsheet available to me. Now I'm wondering if I should create a character sheet for each book. Except that a lot of characters overlap. A lot of the locations are used in multiple books, too, which is another pinch point. I'm just not sure how to organize all my information for the maximum benefit and it's leaving me frustrated.
