[sf-lug] OT: quick and dirty interactive electoral vote calculator

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Matt Price wrote:

> hi sf-lugers,
>
> greetings from canada!

Hey Matt!

> hope it's ok to ask a quick non-linux question.  I'm just making a quick 
> US election spreadsheet, with rows for the various states.  I intended 
> to have a radio button for each row, with the possible values "Obama", 
> "McCain", amd "Undecided"; depending on the value, the electoral votes 
> for that state would be added to the electoral college total for Obama, 
> McCain, or neither.  As far as i can see there's no simple way to do 
> this in Openoffice.

A bit late, but:

I guess without a radio button working (although I have a sense that one 
could achieve this with OOo scipting maybe?), I would just enter 1 or 0 to 
mean an Obama win or an Obama loss - or indeed, the string "McCain" or 
"Obama".  Then you can COUNT() or SUM().

> How would other people solve this problem, either in openoffice or using 
> some other tool?  It seems like a very simple problem, but I don't want 
> to have to build a whole new interface from scratch just to make it 
> work. And while there are lots of online calculators, i expect firefox 
> to crash multiple times on election night and i don't want to keep 
> losing my predictions.  Anyone have any suggestions?

Those are my thoughts, at least.  I'm curious to hear what others think 
and what you ended up doing, if anything.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Q:	How do you keep a moron in suspense?