Roll Charts
This web site is devoted to Dual Sport and Adventure Motorcycle Ride roll charts. It includes a free full featured web based utility designed to inspire creativity in roll chart development that is easy to use.
Introduction
The work of creating and formatting a roll chart for a dual sport motorcycle ride is a very tedious task. A simple web based software utility was developed that generates a narrow format roll chart including standard tulip diagrams in MS-Excel to make this effort a little easier. Having the roll chart in MS-Excel makes it much easier to edit after the fact and to make quick adjustments without having to start from scratch. We sometimes carry PDA's while exploring on our motorcycles, and having the roll chart in MS-Excel allows us to make quick changes to the instruction data that can later be quickly process into a new roll chart.
Free Web Utility
An online version of the Roll Chart Utility was developed with the hope that others might find it useful. The aim is not to build a tool that does everything. The goal is to provide what the vast majority of roll chart creators need to get the results they want. Just download the MS-Excel Route Instruction Template and upload it back to this site with your route information. The web site will spit back a completely formatted roll chart in MS-Excel based on your uploaded file. All the instructions are contained in the MS-Excel file.
This tool would not be possible without the Perl Library Spreadsheet::WriteExcel maintained by John McNamara.
Development Roadmap
This website is definitely a low priority project, so changes will be slow. Current development plans are to add the ability to import Garmin Mapsource generated route directions and/or Delorme StreetAtlas generated route directions. Other planned features are to allow users to add their own custom tulip diagrams, to have an option to generate a muli column PDF file instead of the Excel file, and to have an option to change the scroll direction. Enjoy!!!