I’m concerned almost exclusively with Yacht Club Courses. EzTrap out of the box is limited to 12 marks. We currently use 28 fixed marks (not all at once, that would be silly!), from which an RO will select a predefined course which may have up to about 7 or 8 legs. With up to 9 ‘fleets’ (some will do identical courses) we could easily use more than 12 marks. I don’t want to have to enter the positions of the marks to be used as I’m bobbing about. Ideally I’d like to extend EzTrap to accommodate a larger number of marks. I haven’t yet started to unpick the code to see how to do this. Has anyone done it? How much grief will I incur?
Secondly: my spreadsheet of choice is from the LibreOffice suite. (I’m a cheapskate.) What’s my chances of EzTrap working with LibreOffice Calc? I know I could suck it and see, but if anyone else has tried and succeeded/failed it might save me many fruitless hours.
Hi Malcom,
Welcome to the Sailwave/ezTrap User Group.
Unfortunately ezTrap will not work when opened in LibreOffice. ezTrap uses a lot of macros to do its work and these are not currently compatible with LibreOffice Calc and might never be.
As to feasibility of extending the number of marks available for selection, I will have to let Jon answer that question.
Kind regards,
Huw
To solve this issue, I have created copies of the EzTrap spreadsheet renaming each one after the most used courses. It seems to work well.
Our Summer Series luckily only uses 5 marks one of them an inflatable for super light air.
interesting option. But looking through our 110 committee boat and 92 clubhouse set courses I could probably create groups with up to 10 marks. The downside would be that our ROs (who normally only do one duty a season - a regular, well-briefed, IT literate RO would be a boon!) would need to be able to find the right ones quickly and easily. And one of the hopes I had was that I could overlay the six or seven courses chosen (one for each fleet) to confirm that there was minimum ‘interference’. Similarly, creating every course as a unique spreadsheet would at least make them ‘easy’ to find, but not allow overlays. More thinking needed by me. I’m reluctant to invest a lot of effort (and buy Excel!) for something that might be too cumbersome in practise. Oh, and did I mention that the RO has the option of dispensing with the pre-planned courses and making up their own (not encouraged, but if you are RO, you are in charge).
thanks, Excel it will have to be, alas.
If you google Microsoft Office key there are lots of offers for less than £20 and home and student versions for less than £10
There is now a new version of ezTrap available for download from the Sailwave website.
The main enhancement is the increase in the number of marks available in Club mode to 21 Marks
Thanks to Ed for authoring this version.
Any feedback is gratefully received.
Jon