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Games Entertainment

Excel - The Ultimate Halo 2 Accessory 34

Posted by Zonk from the what's-your-ROI-with-the-shotgun? dept.
Lev13than writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that a Microsoft Employee has hacked up an Excel spreadsheet that performs 'advanced analysis' on a player's Halo 2 stats. The spreadsheet tracks statistics including average kills, deaths and ranking over time, and displays them with charts and graphs. There's even a decent UI to set up reports. Data is refreshed automatically via RSS feeds from Bungie.net. The file can be found here." Bungie's RSS tracking is something we've touched on before.
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Excel - The Ultimate Halo 2 Accessory More

Excel - The Ultimate Halo 2 Accessory

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  • wowsa! (Score:4, Funny)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:23PM (#11025705) Homepage Journal
    Say what you will, but MS sure knows how to integrate all their technologies.

    • Re:wowsa! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by metalhed77 ( 250273 ) <`andrewvc' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:59PM (#11026162) Homepage
      Ummm, that's curious because the technology which allows the integration, rss, is an open standard not developed by MS. It's parent standard XML is one that MS has refused to adopt for MS Office instead locking you into the proprietary and hard to reverse engineer .doc format. It integrates because MS is acting out of character.
      • Although I have to admit that I'm against MS's many lock-in schemes, at least they'll be moving to XML for Office files in the future.

      • Re:wowsa! (Score:4, Informative)

        by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @02:55AM (#11029674) Homepage
        Wow. Please try crawling out from your rock and take a look at the last two versions of MS Office.

        Both 2002 and 2003 have been totally integrated on XML formats and supported it back and forth. Every program imports/exports to XML. Excel can pull data from XML documents like Access from an SQL server. Even FrontPage can edit XML data nativly.

        The new Infopath program uses XML as its native file format.

        Microsoft has done everything *but* refuse to adopt XML.

        MS also has supported RSS. Take a look at their website news articles (the Expert Zone, for example).
        • Hmmm, I was under the impression that MS XML wasn't an open standard (that it'd be as difficult as .doc to reverse engineer). If MS truly does support then great. Of course, it still won't really help me until the default file save option is XML so that when a client sends me a word document they send it in a format that's easier to read.
          • In that case, you'll be happy to know that starting with Office 2003 a user (or admin) can change the default Save Format by going to Tools, Options, Save, and looking at the bottom.

            You could also coach your clients to choose File, Save As, File Type, and "XML" if you really wanted to. :)

            With InfoPath's native format being XML, you can bet that it won't take too many more versions until other MS files do the same thing.
        • Woo. Office supports XML. C'mon, they can't even get HTML right! (not even in Frontpage...)

  • Could the same game also ignite sales of Microsoft Excel?
    Dont push it too far Microsoft...

    But in all seriousness, this application is just what Halo 2 needs...I remember when Perfect Dark for Nintendo 64 came out with it's stat tracking abilities, I spent hours getting my stats higher than all my friends. Now I can do the same thing and get bragging rights to my wins!

    Next we just need support for other spreadsheats than Excel. Maybe we can track stats with a MySQL server someday?

    • Next we just need support for other spreadsheats than Excel. Maybe we can track stats with a MySQL server someday?
      Sorry, MySQL is not a spreadsheet, let alone a proper RDBMS.

  • H2SA kicks ass (Score:4, Informative)

    by SeaEye420 ( 613209 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:37PM (#11025901)
    For those that don't want to spend $300(or whatever the going rate is for Excel2003, which is required) just to see some fancy stats, check out this [m-williams.org] Halo 2 Stats Aggregator. It's cross platform(actually, it's just a perl script) and it's GPL, so if you like some stats that aren't calculated yet you can just code them up yourself. And, you can probably submit patches to Matt so that we can all benefit from your beautiful work. :)

    Thanks Matt, H2SA rocks!

    • Re:H2SA kicks ass (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BorgHunter ( 685876 )
      Or you could just get a copy of OpenOffice [openoffice.org] and have the ability to track your stats AND open other Excel files as well. Not to mention Word and Powerpoint.
    • It's cross platform(actually, it's just a perl script) and it's GPL, so if you like some stats that aren't calculated yet you can just code them up yourself.

      Which is why this article qualifies as pure advert.
    • What? This guy over at thepiratebay.org [thepiratebay.org] told me office was free...
    • I grabbed H2SA yesterday, and I must confirm that it does rock, especially once you start modding it to output compliant XHTML 1.1, use functions for writing out table rows (eliminating false precision on floats), take usernames from args, and so on.
      My stats page [goon-squad.net] (updates 0400 EST)
      Bug me if you want the modified source.
      • Did you try sending your modified source to his g-mail account? I'm sure he'd be happy to add your stuff in, as it looks very nice. If he's not interested, maybe you could post it on your web page somewhere so I can download it and take a look?

        Either way, looks cool, thanks for the neat alternative! :)

  • Product Placement (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Red Moose ( 31712 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @07:51PM (#11026053)
    This is advertising and product/brand placement gone too far. When I read this stuff in a newspaper I wonder does anyone believe it's an actual article or is it basically advertising - there's no need to mention:

    Microsoft (14 times) Halo 2 (12 times) Excel (11 times)

    Halo 2 stuff was everywhere - marketed to the kids but now they are trying to get to the money market of 25-35 yo people (the PS2 market).

    It's a sure fire way to get people to pirate copies of Office XP though. This Seattle Times "article" is an advert, nothing more.

    • No. All Microsoft did was publish Halo 2 stats via RSS. These spreadsheets were developed entirely by fans, with no support from MS.

      I'm not terribly surprised that an article about a product mentions that product. By that logic, Slashdot is nothing more than a giant shill for Linux (cue +5-rated replies rationalizing why that's a good thing).
      • (Yes, I realize the spreadsheet in this article was developed by a Microsoft employee. He's not the first by far, there were many others developed by fans.)
    • >> but now they are trying to get to the money market of 25-35 yo people (the PS2 market).

      I'd target Halo as being far more for the 25-35 market than the ridiculous Japanese RPGs that are often quoted as the PS2's biggest "advantage" over the Xbox.

  • First, you need Excel 2003 Pro, although he is working on making the file work with all versions of Excel. (I'm not sure if he means Excel 2003 Student edition or Excel 97 onward).

    Second, he's a pretty crappy [bungie.net] player, or he picks his teams poorly.

    Now it just makes me want to play Halo 2... Grr.
  • My roommate coded something similar using MS's C# Express beta. If you want to check it out go here:

    http://www.opedog.com/BungieNetStatsDisplay/ [opedog.com]

    The only downside is you need the .NET framework 2.0.

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