On the template, there’s another sheet called “Regions.” This sheet allows us to figure out how many miles (or kilometers) long and wide our land features are, and the total square miles or kilometers. Though this has nothing to do with travel, this chapter’s subject, it’s on the same template to make use of the Schema sheet. Most of us likely won’t care about the total square miles of land in a region or sovereign power, but for those who do, this sheet calculates it for you.
Here is a screen shot:
Measure the length and height of each sovereign power or land feature on a continent. This will help you learn how big everything is. With the inches columns filled in, we can once again use the Schema sheet to determine how many miles and kilometers everything is by referring to the appropriate cells. In the image above, you can see “Continent Name” is fifteen inches long. Since I don’t have fifteen inches on Schema (I stopped at 2.75), I used math to get my fifteen inches. In other words, the calculation is for two inches multiplied by seven (to get fourteen inches), then one inch being added to it. For example, =ROUND((Schema!B9*7)+(Schema!B5),1). The same was done for height. Doing it this way once again means that if I ever change the scale of my map, these numbers change for me.
The calculation for square miles/kilometers is done by multiplying the values for length by height. However, this assumes your land feature is a square or rectangle when it probably isn’t. The solution for this is another multiplication, this time by a percentage represented by a decimal value. For example, if we have a forest that is 100 miles by 80 miles, the square miles would be 8,000 (100 * 80). However, maybe it’s not an actual rectangle, so we decide ten percent of that area is not included in the territory. We’d change the calculation from 100 * 80 to (100 * 80) * .9, resulting in 7,200 square miles. The same modification is done to square kilometers. This example is in the spreadsheet for “Forest #1 Name” under “Kingdom #2 Name.”
Lastly
When experimenting with this spreadsheet, be careful of the way Excel works. We can accidentally change the formula in a cell if we click elsewhere. It’s best to use the tab key to navigate out of a cell with a formula.
