I've pieced together an .ods spreadsheet with the goal in mind to convey all important orders to the SM with the best organisation possible.
It consists of two simple tables with several charts inside. The palyer would simply enter his changes and paste the correct notes into the changelog. The SM would receive this document by whatever means and opens them, he scans the changelog and switches over to the next table and has all orders of the empire in detailed form and easily recognisable. I've created a small example in this screenshot:
The upper portion shows the first table, containing a (very incomplete) list of notes to simply copy and enter a location name for. The lower portion displays the actual information with the colour applied. The SM would simply do these changes and turn all text on this table black when he's done, then insert the completion dates.
My current idea was that he'd update the changelog with copies from the right side of the notes, but this isn't really necessary I think, so he would simply wipe the changelist and send it back because of the completion dates.
I could send this spreadsheet to all players by mail - This would create a standardised means by which we send our updates
The problems I see:
The only information this easily conveys are completion dates. In a text document I'd think it's hard to properly attach completion dates to all tasks without writing a wall of text or making it incomprehensible. The downside, however, is that the SM still has to send a regular update text back, as well as all officers seperately.
Furthermore, this table isn't complete yet. You could easily copy the templates for other planets, so you could manage a whole empire with this kind of thing, but it yet lacks any ship orders and writing the 'changelist' with two words more per line would obsolete the entire second table if all necessary information is given.
Without a large empire there's just no need to abstain from writing ten lines in a text document to display the same information as in these two tables. As an example, all of the above changes could be said like this:
Convert X CI to Mines on Earth at 50%
Convert X CI to CF on Earth at 50%
Rename shipyard X to Y
Upgrade shipyard X to Y tonnage / slipways
Put a geology team together for Earth
Set officer X as administrator of Earth
What are your opinions? Although I've just made it in the last 10 minutes I'm rather against it when I realised the faults. This might come in handy once we all have several colonies and a hundred ships, though.