[Edi]

Open Office works very much like the Microsoft Office suite. Obviously there are some differences, but the basic functions are the same, especially in the spreadsheet application.

I'm aware of the problem with the spreadsheet bringing most computers to a screeching halt when it loads, it does the same for my own machine, which is a fairly top of the line rig bought just last September. That's an unfortunate side effect of the heavy use of VLOOKUP on the display page, but I don't know of anything else that will keep the data sorted correctly under all circumstances (given how the functions have been entered). It also allows me to pay minimal attention to maintaining the display, unlike with the Dom2DB where I screwed up with design and had to do five times the amount of work to get results only half as good as the Dom3DB. It loaded faster, true. It was also a nightmare to maintain.

Converting the thing to Excel, while possible, would have been more work than it was worth at the time when there was so much else to do.

There will be a DB update after the next patch because of the new nations and there would be one regardless of such additions merely on account of the huge number of stat fixes we're going to see.

It's possible I'll provide an Excel version at that point, and it will also have fixed formulas for age and possibly for prot as well. The problem with an Excel file would be, aside from data format conversion (which is rather trivial now that I know some of the OO peculiarities regarding Booleans) its size. The current Unit DB in Excel could run over 10 MB easily if past comparisons of Excel vs Open Office file size for the same data are anything to go by.

For people who are currently having problems with the DB, save a new copy and delete everything on the unit display page from the columns that have text entries (the undead/demon/magicbeing/animal and the survival columns onward and leave just the numerical data and random masks. That will cut out a huge amount of array references, reduce file size and reduce load times significantly. You're going to have to look that data up on the BaseU page, though.