A recent discussion on Bob Cordery's blog, regarding generating random layouts for Portable Wargame boards, led me back to an idea I had some years ago for using MS Excel's conditional formatting function to do just that. Put simply, when a condition is met by the content of a spreadsheet cell, another cell will automatically be populated, say by a coloured fill. This enables a PW Grid to be randomly populated with colours representing scenery.
The following demonstrates this using a 6x6 grid, a system I'm currently trying using 3x3PW rules.
Two identical grids are made, one contains a random number generating function, in this case set between 1 and 20, though this can easily be altered. The other has the conditional formatting set in each corresponding cell.
The sheet I have generated will populate the squares using the above values - I put two possible options for wooded/forested squares which I may edit. The hills and woods are universal across all 36 of the grids; the lakes are restricted to the middle two rows, and the Built Up Areas are restricted to the centre 4 squares. This was just a preference for my own purposes. The type of terrain to be generated can be tailored by the settings of the formatting.
Following are a few random examples that were created with the above settings:
Adding other features such as roads or rivers automatically is currently beyond the scope of this spreadsheet, however Lakes need to be fed by a water feature and settlements usually have some sort of track/road going to them, so these can be added as makes some sort of sense.
