Presenting the Second Life Fashion & Shopping Events Spreadsheet!

Hi everyone! I was so amazed and delighted with the response to my recent post about my Second Life events spreadsheet that I researched my buns off and figured out not only how to share and embed this spreadsheet for others to enjoy, but also how to allow people to have their own personalized copy. So excited! Please click the link below to check it out:

Second Life Fashion & Shopping Events Schedule

There was a bit of discussion about additionally creating a calendar-based format in the comments of my post. Out of curiosity, I began setting one up to see how different it would function, and I personally find it to be more cumbersome and it requires more time to update and more clicks to get to to the relevant information. The main issue I was concerned with is that Google Calendars appear to truncate data if too many events begin overlapping, which as we know is extremely common in Second Life. Here’s a screenshot for reference:

I had only added 12 events to the calendar before I stopped; the screenshot is taken with a resized browser window so I could fit it to a reasonable size, but even with my browser maximized to my full 1920×1080 resolution, and the calendar set to the “Compact” sizing option, at most we would be able to view 7 concurrent events at a time. That’s why you see the little “+5 more” or similar links beneath the dates. Also if you needed a SLURL, which I included in the “Where” field for each event I added to the calendar, you’d have to open the event information and copy the link either into another browser window or into the Location bar of the viewer. As best I could tell, there was no way to make those SLURLs clickable without adding HTML code.

TL;DR – Spreadsheets are at-a-glance and super easy to update, so that’s what I’m stickin’ to! ♥

You can learn more about the formatting and how it updates on the spreadsheet page, but I wanted to add a neat trick here: there’s a way that you can have your own personal version of the spreadsheet that will auto-update for you, usually in as little as 30 seconds after I make a change. How cool is that? There are some limitations however: if you make any changes to the sheet, like highlighting certain rows, or adding notes in a specific event’s row, that information will all get overwritten or shifted around the next time the sheet is updated. If anyone knows how to get the information to dynamically update into someone’s personalized sheet and yet allow changes that they’ve made to specific rows to “travel” with the updates, I’d love to know!

So how would a personal version be helpful? Probably the best way to use it would be to set up a new Google Sheets document, have my event schedule auto-populate into one of the sheets, and then use an additional sheet to store information about your sponsors, which events they’re participating in, your most-used SLURLs for post credits, and so on. I know this might make your head spin if you’re not too familiar with spreadsheets (I’m an Excel throwback, so Google Sheets were somewhat familiar but still completely new to me). However, if you’re somewhat comfortable with working with them, here’s how you would set up your own, auto-updating copy of the data:

❖ Go to Google Drive, click on the red New button, and choose Google Sheets.

❖ In the first cell of the sheet, A1, paste in the following code snippet:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UAupdzbtEhoDJtJWQRulbuGiRGJKE9QtQKyugBb_8yA","Second Life Fashion & Shopping Events!A1:D200")

❖ Hit your Enter button. At this point, you may see a #REF! cell, or a pop-up asking you to give permission to the master sheet to enter data into your personal sheet. Click the “Allow” button, and that should do it!

You may need to fancy-up the formatting a bit (add bold text, realign the columns, etc) but once that’s complete, the sheet should automatically update itself with new or changed event and dates as I work on the master sheet. Awesome-sauce!

I’m flirting with the idea of adding additional sheets to the master. These might include a similar schedule that covers ongoing hunts; SLURLs and Marketplace links for active designers and brands; scenic destinations to help bloggers and Flickr photographers find locales for special shots; and so on. That’s me – once I get the seed of an idea for a project, it just grows and grows! Let me know in the comments if any of these additional options would be useful, and please do enjoy the spreadsheet/schedule. Thank you to all of the lovely commenters who inspired and motivated me to make it a resource that everyone could benefit from! ♥

Second Life Fashion & Shopping Events Schedule