Bonus Preparation Spreadsheet For Rallies

Greg Rice

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#1
I have decided to withdraw from this year’s Iron Butt Rally and I wanted to make my bonus preparation spreadsheet tool available to everyone who wanted to use it.

Over the years riding in rallies I have developed a spreadsheet tool ( image below ) that I use to handle most of the work building the bonus names using the convention that I like to use in Basecamp to build routes for a rally.

The tool will build a bonus name following the conventions I like to use based off of many ideas from top rally riders. Among some of the features is that the tool assigns waypoint symbols and waypoint symbol color based on bonus availability and bonus point value. I use waypoint symbols that are available in Garmin’s Basecamp that have the same symbol with at least three different colors. That way I can have three different point value ranges that make it easier to decide on what bonuses I should include in my route planning. I use RED to identify the high point bonuses so it is easier to see them in Basecamp.

The tool will also import bonus GPX files and bonus point files to make getting the raw data easier into the spreadsheet.

You can download my Excel spreadsheet tool by clicking this link: http://www.gregrice.com/rallyplanning/RallyPlanning-Bonus-Prep-Bonus-Points-Import.zip

If you have questions about how to use the spreadsheet tool please review the bonus help file which is downloadable here: http://www.gregrice.com/rallyplanning/Bonus-prep-greg-rice-information-2.jpg

More help is available by going to my “how I rally” webpage where there is a lot more information regarding how to use my bonus prep tool: http://www.gregrice.com/rallys/rallys.html

After reading the help information and my rally webpage you still have questions you can reach out to me and I will try and assist you.


Bonus-prep-greg-rice-information-2-web.jpg
 

Marc11

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#6
Just a heads up, Greg's sheet only works in Excel, I cannot get it to work in Libre Office so far. Going to run through some debugging of the code and see if I can "fix" it. If successful I'll post a link.
 

kwthom

=o&o>
Premier Member
IBA Member
#10
I'd used a much earlier version of one of Greg's spreadsheets as inspiration for plotting some of my more-than-a-day Iron Butt rides in Google Sheets.

The ability to generate a GPX is golden, though. Nice work (as usual), Greg!
 

Airportbum

Premier Member
#13
Has anyone tried this on a Mac? I have excel on a mac but cannot get the file to export to GPX. I type in Desktop as location, but it comes back with error.
 

SteveG

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#16
Greg - first off, thank you for providing this for us to use / explore. But, did you disable any columns? The time zone and sunrise / sunset columns don't seem to calculate automatically on any machine I've tried (win7 or win10). The columns just return #NAME? and #VALUE!
 

Greg Rice

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#17
Greg - first off, thank you for providing this for us to use / explore. But, did you disable any columns? The time zone and sunrise / sunset columns don't seem to calculate automatically on any machine I've tried (win7 or win10). The columns just return #NAME? and #VALUE!
Send me an email to [email protected] and I will try and help.
 
#18
Greg,

Thanks for the spreadsheet.

Used it practicing for Team Strange MN-1000 successfully opening previous years GPX files. When I got the GPX file Friday night for Saturday's 2021 run, I tried importing and received "Run time error "52": Bad file name or number. Did not want to dive into this Friday night so I used an alternative method for plotting bonuses.

Do you have a idea what went wrong or would you like me to PM you a copy of the GPX file?

Thanks for sharing your work.

-Mark
 

Greg Rice

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#19
Greg,

Thanks for the spreadsheet.

Used it practicing for Team Strange MN-1000 successfully opening previous years GPX files. When I got the GPX file Friday night for Saturday's 2021 run, I tried importing and received "Run time error "52": Bad file name or number. Did not want to dive into this Friday night so I used an alternative method for plotting bonuses.

Do you have a idea what went wrong or would you like me to PM you a copy of the GPX file?

Thanks for sharing your work.

-Mark
Mark, First I have heard of that error. If you could send me the file you got the error with I can take a look. [email protected]