In preparation for an upcoming rallycross event I am working on the timing system. We have a basic excel sheet to enter times and penalties and total everything up. I would like to have a second display of the sheet that competitors can view in real time to see their results after each run.
The idea is to connect the main laptop to a secondary laptop via an ethernet cable and set up a LAN. Is there any easy way to open the timing spreadsheet in read only on the secondary laptop so it can be refreshed to see changes made to the primary spreadsheet as they happen? Can this be done by sharing the workbook?
I may be overthinking this as I haven't started playing with it yet but I am going to try to set it up tonight.
You'll have to share the directory that the spreadsheet is in. Then from the other laptop, open the spreadsheet. It will say something about "ready only" and go OK. To refresh on the remote, close the spreadsheet and reopen it. On the main one, just save it when you make changes.
Is there a way to refresh without closing and opening it?
Google Docs and a simple script could run it live without opening and closing, but I don't know of a way to share live data in "real" office. What about just running a second display - one toward you and another toward the crowd?
The second display was the first idea, however it would only show the section of the spreadsheet the timer is working in and some results would be cut off.
If anyone in your group does web development this would be pretty easy to do, using a CSV source (which you could save from Excel) and an auto-refreshing PHP page to read and display the values from it.
If you have some kind of wireless access point then everyone could connect and see the sheet from their phones.
There are sleeker ways to do it but this is probably the best in terms of functionality vs. effort.
Just thought of something: easier yet, when you update the sheet, save a copy as HTML to a web server's host directory. Same effect, no coding required.
We print results between heats. I've never had any complaints about that practice.
Hmmm... All the saving would be a bit of a pain after x number of times. I don't mind putting together the script and setting up the info if you don't mind using google docs but you would need internet access. The data would be live (from almost instant to a few second delay) and could be formatted however you like.
It actually was easier than I though.
Published the worksheet to a webpage, saved is a timing.htm on my hard drive and enabled auto-publishing. Connected the computers to share files and pulled up the .htm file on the secondary computer. Now whenever the main spreadsheet is saved the secondary computer can refresh and see the results.
You can also simply link the data fields.
