Excel - The Ultimate Halo 2 Accessory

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.

Comments

wowsa!

[BortQ]

Say what you will, but MS sure knows how to integrate all their technologies.

Re:wowsa!

[metalhed77]

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.

Re:wowsa!

[DavidD_CA]

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).

H2SA kicks ass

[SeaEye420]

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 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

[BorgHunter]

Or you could just get a copy of OpenOffice and have the ability to track your stats AND open other Excel files as well. Not to mention Word and Powerpoint.

Re:H2SA kicks ass

[darkpurpleblob]

Have you tested the spreadsheet it in OpenOffice? The current spreadsheet only works in Excel 2003 Professional, so I am somewhat dubious it would work in OpenOffice.

Re:H2SA kicks ass

[rhpot1991]

Doesn't work in OOo, it more than likely uses VB code.

Product Placement

[Red Moose]

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.

Re:Great Idea

[Safety Cap]

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.

My roommate made something similar

[ClutchUGA]

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/

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