This year I’m continuing to serve as a parent volunteer with our speech and debate team at Classen School of Advanced Studies in Oklahoma City. Last semester I ‘made the digital switch’ and started flowing all cross examination (CX) debate rounds on my laptop instead of using legal pads. I’ve seen some different ways people are using Microsoft Excel to keep flows. For the tournament this weekend at Norman High, I’m using an Apple laptop which has Numbers (part of iWork ’09) installed on it instead of Excel for MS Office. I created a CX debate flow template for Numbers ’09 and based it on other flows I’ve seen people use. The fixed header rows for speeches are ‘frozen’ so they persist when scrolling, and I set the cell contents to “fit” so they expand when more text is entered than will fit on one line in a column. Download it from my public Dropbox with this link: wfryer.me/cxflow. I also exported an Excel version, but I haven’t tested it so if you use it please let me know how it works. Download the MS Excel version from my Public Dropbox using: wfryer.me/cxflow2.
Changing the cell formatting to wrap and fit was a little different from what I’ve done previously in Excel. There, as I recall I just right-clicked / control-clicked on a cell and then turned on “wrap.” For Numbers, it’s necessary to use the inspector panel and click the button “fit” next to row height.
If you use either of these CX debate flow templates and find them helpful, please let me know with a tweet or comment. Also, if you prefer a different format for flowing CX rounds using a digital spreadsheet please let me know about it. I definitely like transitioning to digital/green debate round flowing, but I’m also open to any suggestions for better ways to do it.
I used the Apple Support article “Displaying Content Too Large for Its Cell” to figure out the wrap/fit steps.
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