Orange 🍊 Book Club // Finished

Week 4 is here.

As a note (and I’ll be more timely with them in the future), we will next week start the last chapter of volume 1. And either the week after that or after a one week break, we will start volume 2.

I will post a tentative schedule for volume 2 soon, meaning a schedule for 1ch/week. But I’ll also set up a poll for reading speed next week.

And lastly, the vote for whether to have a break or not is still open and will stay open for up to 7 more days.

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At the end of the paper edition I have there is an extra story … do folks want to read that as well? Perhaps during break week if not everyone is interested?

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It is that story. I’m not entirely sure when I’m reading that since it is 5 chapters long. I will read it at some point though. If we want, we could read that together or at least add a thread/topic for it. But I won’t be reading that during the break. (The break happens to fall at the same time as I have house guests, so it works well for me that the majority (by one vote) seems to want a break. ^^)

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We have a minor majority for having a break (majority was fine with either), so I’ll go ahead and call a break.

We’ll start volume 2 on August 13th.

Volume two page count (from an earlier post because I don’t have volume 2 with me right now) is:
Letter 5: 48 pages
Letter 6: 34
Letter 7: 44
Letter 8: 44

So if people want to speed up, we have two options:
(a) double our speed, ca 85 pages per week
(b) read chapter 5, then 6+half 7, and lastly second half 7 + 8 (aka read over 3 weeks). This would lead to 48 pages for week 1 of volume 2, and then ca 61 pages for the following two weeks.

For option (b) I don’t know if there is a good place to divide chapter 7 (because I don’t have access to volume 2 right now, I will tomorrow), but I have feeling there might be considering what chapters have looked like so far. And I’d try to aim to make week 2 and 3 of volume two roughly equal length (meaning we’d read more of chapter 7 second week).

So poll time:

What reading speed would you prefer for volume 2 (4 chapters)?
  • Same as before: 1 chapter per week (~43 pages / week)
  • Speed up slightly: 1 ch, then 1.5 ch per week (48 p first week, then ~61 p / week)
  • Double the speed: 2 ch per week (~85 p / week)

0 voters

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Next week is here! Chapter 4 and the last one of volume 1. After this we will take one week off, and then continue with volume 2 starting August 13th.


I have put up a preliminary schedule for volume 2 (in the OP) since the consensus seems to be to keep our current speed, but I will keep the poll open for about a week (although it looks like most people who are reading have voted).

I want to thank everyone who have joined this book club. Joining me on my first foray into leading a club. I hope I’ve done a credible job (we have so many good book club leaders!). And I hope to keep seeing you around. :smiley:

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I just had something interesting happen. I have the same background color, due to conditional formatting), right after the other, despite them being different page numbers.

If I understand the conditional highlighting correctly, the color is picked by page number, so if there are no entries for a specific number of pages, then two entries in the row can have the same color despite different page numbers?

Or have I managed to mess something up? Totally an option.

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Correct. This is usually rare in the ABBC because there will typically be at least one word within a span of pages for however many colors I added to the conditional formatting. For higher level books (and especially when past the first volume), it’s much more likely to have two of the same color in a row due to a gap in pages.

I originally wanted to have the conditional formatting so that there’s a black line across between pages, but at the time I didn’t know how to make that work. Maybe I do now. I should experiment with it…

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Ah, I remember the problem now: Google Sheets can’t do borders in conditional formatting =(

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Out of curiosity, why didn’t you build it around checking what page number the previous row has? But I guess, then you run into the trouble of how to make it use multiple colors, huh? I’m really not well versed in spreadsheet logic, just enough to do some basic stuff, and then a little more to get me in trouble. :joy:

That’s the reason.

I’m sure there’s a way to make it work. There’s the tried-and-true method of adding a formula column to make things easier, but that fails if someone adds a new row (where the formula doesn’t copy over).

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Which feels like a Sheets quirk, because I’m positive I have Excel documents that I’ve built which utilize a formula column that auto-populates correctly when a new row is added.

I’ll have to go digging through some of my formulas there to see what I did… If I find something that works in Sheets, I’ll mention it to you (since this came up when we were working on the basic template as well).

It’s also possible I utilized VBA code to make that happen, now that I think about it, which obviously wouldn’t be an option in Sheets. :sweat_smile:

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@ChristopherFritz @MrGeneric

I don’t know if this applies to the current version that @ChristopherFritz made, but I’ve added rows and the conditional formatting came with them without problem.

But as I mentioned, I know just enough to be dangerous, so I stay away when things get complicated because I’m more likely to mess something up. xD

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For this, this only works in Excel when it’s in a table (something Sheets doesn’t support).

Well, maybe newer Excel versions do it when not in a table as well? I use tables for anything with tabular data in Excel these days, so I don’t know about when not using a table… (Thus the above statement may be wrong.)

Conditional formula = applies to a range (so it applies when adding a row within that range)

Formula = content within a cell, so it applies only to that cell

Not any more :wink:

At least for chapter 4. I’m looking at how to copy conditional formatting from one sheet to another. And for all four chapters, as well.

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:exploding_head:

Thanks! Whatever you did is above my head. We have so many competent folks on the forums. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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If you are referring to the template in the Tips thread, everything is currently written within the Conditional Formatting, instead of utilizing a formula column.

The Good:

  • Prevents adding rows from breaking code since (for one reason or another) the formulas don’t autopopulate in the new row when using the formula column method.

The Bad:

  • Sheets has a limit to what formulas work within the Conditional Formatting, so it takes away some options for formatting the sheets (adding borders, like @ChristopherFritz mentioned, is one such restriction).

I’d have to look at the documents at work.

I wrote them a couple years now and have everything in a way that it just works so I don’t have to think about it.

It may be that I used tables, but it could be that Excel just added more functionality, or it could be that I got irritated with the restrictions I found and made a VBA macro to get around those restrictions. I’ve done that for a few problems to save myself some irritation. :joy:

But you mentioning tables does make me feel like that’s probably what I did.

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Old formula: =Mod(D2, 6)=1

New formula: =Mod(Count(Unique($D$2:D2)),6)=1

Simple as can be :wink:

Since I use Excel at work a lot, I spent a bit of time each day learning a lot of the basic functionality.


Surprisingly, when I know that certain functionality exists (even if I don’t remember how to do it), I find places where that functionality is exactly what I need.

Think of two people trying to put a screw into a board. Both people own hammers, but one person has never heard of a screwdriver and the other has.

The latter person will head out to the store to inquire about that tool they heard about before for getting a screw into wood. (Or maybe they bought one previously, knowing they’d need it one day.)

The former person is left to try using their fingers or hammer to get that screw into the wood. They don’t know there exists a tool for that exact job.


This is why I always tell co-workers that if there’s an application they use a lot (such as Word or Excel or Outlook), each day they should find one button on it that they don’t know what it is, and learn about it. By becoming more proficient in the tools you use every day, you are literally becoming more competent, and in the workplace that can mean being more valuable to your co-workers. (And, it lets you do fun things on book club vocabulary sheets.)

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Just a crazy idea: Why not determine the color by the page number? :grin:

So let’s say P is your page number (modulo 256 for good measure). Now you could use (P, P, P) but that would just give you 256 shades of gray which is a bit boring, and pretty hard to differentiate, I assume. But you actually have 7 different ways of combining P with 0 to get colors (3x P with 0 and 0, 3x P and P with 0, and 1x (P, P, P)). You could use P modulo 7 to determine which combo to create. That should make sure that the colors are different enough between pages, and you won’t get the same color next to each other for 2 pages unless there is a gap of 256 pages :nerd_face:

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While I imagine that’d look quite pretty, I believe the idea is for them to be actually distinct from each other. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well they are different… for some page ranges, no? :sweat_smile:

These are the 7 colors for page 255:

image

:grin:

But you are right, I hadn’t expected the colors to be so dark for so long. Here are the colors for page 100:

image

:woman_shrugging:

But if we take ff instead of 00 for the padding of the colors, then it gets much better. Here are some color blocks:

For page 1:

image

For page 100:

image

For page 200:

image

and if we take page count div 7 as the base for this, then we’d get to 1400 pages already which feels like plenty for a vocab sheet :rofl:

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Top reason not to do this: I don’t know how to do this in Google Sheets conditional formatting :wink:

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