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Looking for advises on adventure data entering methods

In a big realm I try to tag every topic with as many tags as I can come up with. That way when I'm adding a new topic and I need the elderly male dwarf merchant I created earlier I just filter on those tags and I get at most a few hits and can easily find the right one.

For me at least that serves to knit the whole realm together more as I tend to reuse and interconnect things more since I don't just create new NPC's since I cannot find an appropriate existing one faster than creating one.
 
Well, I gathered that much and I played around with them briefly but couldn't see how they could help me.

Everybody talks about them and praises them - oh well, I will probbaly find something to use them for one day :-)
 
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I have mix of Setting, Adventures and Mechanics with total of ~2100 topic/articles in my Dark Heresy 2 realm. Without Views, the navigation pane is just too big to manage during session. In addition, views provides super fast and easy way to filter just the necessary set of articles such as monster manual (full or partial), combat rules, items, psychic powers and etc. so many things you can do to make your life easier and so little views and slots :D

I spent some time playing with tags... watched all your great clips on YouTube and even though I see the benefit, the lack of convenient interface to do the tagging makes me a bit reluctant to proceed with 2000 articles. Bulk tagging is ok if you don’t have that much granularity but the need to pass first through a temporary view is killing me. :(

They first must implement multi-select option for the navigation pane and allow to make tag/assign/prune/scan/whatever operations on selection level. Otherwise is just too manual work.
 
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Vargr said:
Well, I gathered that much and I played around with them briefly but couldn't see how they could help me.

Everybody talks about them and praises them - oh well, I will probbaly find something to use them for one day :-)
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Are you a computer pro? tags have become a big deal in a lot of other software so since a lot of us are programmers or otherwise employed in IT tags come naturally to us.
 
kbs666 said:
Are you a computer pro? tags have become a big deal in a lot of other software so since a lot of us are programmers or otherwise employed in IT tags come naturally to us.
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Not quite sure what a "computer pro" entails now-a-days but I feel confident messing with my server and maintaining my router, etc. Most programming these days are in VBA.

It is just that I can not see what I gain from using tags in RW - I get it helps in searches and filtering, but considering the extra time it takes to include this info as well, it just doesn't seem worthwhile.

Maybe because I am only entering my own stuff.

Ah well, I am probably a lost cause :-)
 
When your material volume expands, you will HAVE to have them. And you will wish you had taken the time to develop a good tag system because it will seem insurmountable to back and add the tags once you realize you need them.
 
I wish I had my current knowledge and experience of RW before I started 9 months ago :)

I put all data entry on hold until I design good tag scheme for my Warhammer 40K realms.
 
kbs666 said:
Did you design your own categories?
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Yes. I used the "Other" realm type as a base, created copy of existing article categories and modified for my needs or created new ones from scratch. All except one are inside the Mechanics section, as this is where the "Other" template needs some love. :)

I had two goal here - one to create the same "stat block" that i have in the books and another one to prepare for possible export to another program such as Hero Labs or other.

I understood back then, that there is way to export the realm in XML format and with some dark magic of parsing XML files I could (on theory) prepare bulk import and save tremendous of time (as I already did bulk upload of every equipment in the game via the CSV tool).

Attached is a screenshot if you are interested.
 

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This is likely where your lack of tags comes from. You used text snippets in places where tags would have worked fine. Any time a particular thing has a sharply limited number of possible options it makes sense to define a tag instead of using a text snippet. I don't know Dark Heresy but in D&D terms things like alignment or spell school should be tags.
 
kbs666 said:
This is likely where your lack of tags comes from. You used text snippets in places where tags would have worked fine. Any time a particular thing has a sharply limited number of possible options it makes sense to define a tag instead of using a text snippet. I don't know Dark Heresy but in D&D terms things like alignment or spell school should be tags.
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Spot on. I was not "fluent" enough in Realm Works when I started, I was learning on the run, so I used snippets instead of tags. At that time it looked right and I was progressing well by doing bulk upload with the CSV Importer tool. Now I think the tags would have been the best choice for some snippets... :o

Anyway, sometimes you can't plan that much ahead and you have to get back to the drawing board and waste few hours to re-work things. I will have to figure out a quick way to change a snippet to a tag without pain and suffering.

I am excited.
 
I don’t think there is any easy way to do that through the interface. However I think it should be possible to make an export, use a converter tool, and then reimport with snippets that are text converted to tags
 
I suspect Vargr was saying that most of the programming Vargr has done recently is VBA, not that VBA is what most programmers are doing. (The context was an answer to "Are you a computer pro, Vargr?" not anything about the industry.)
 
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@Parody:

You are right; I was referring to myself - as in "now-a-days I do most of my programming in VBA" (Excel, to be exact).

It would be scary indeed if all the software out there was done in VBA...
 
Dark Lord Galen said:
LOL yea but wouldn't Microsoft love that!!....
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Maybe, but for VBA (not VB, not VBScript, not VB.Net or .Net in general, but VBA) to be dominant it would require an alternate history of the industry branching back in the Windows 9x days. Microsoft would have had to force scriptability on applications and make it much easier and cheaper to implement than the VBA libraries they offered at the time. Even then, I don't see how it'd beat out HTML/CSS/JavaScript. (You might have VBScript instead of JavaScript in this alternate history, I suppose.)

Current Microsoft wants everyone to use .Net languages and Azure services for their web applications and has been fumbling on consumer devices since Windows 8. The recent direction of going back to other architectures with a revamped shell, emulated Win32 on non-x86 devices, and similar may work if they stick with it, though I think it doesn't bode well for desktop users. (It's not always fun being the niche.)
 
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