Dealing a round of Dixonary isn’t hard to do manually, but there is a lot of tedious admin. The commonest error when dealing manually is misattribution of votes, because vote-counting typically involves copying votes off the screen onto paper and copying them back again later. But there are many other opportunities for clerical error.
Players generally now use spreadsheets to help with the basic administration of dealing a round. There is a choice of spreadsheets that you can use to help with the task.
Instructions for calculating scores
Make a copy of the spreadsheet, delete all the data, and plug in your definitions, definition numbers and submitters. The submitter of the real definition is Dictionary. This name is magic, and case-sensitive.
After you've received all the votes and plugged them into the "Vote 1" and "Vote 2" column, select Extensions > Apps Script. The Apps Script application will open in a new window.
Select Run. The first time you do this, you will get Google’s standard warnings about the risks of running a 3rd-party script.
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➠ Scorer with summary by Dan Widdis
An Excel scoresheet with a summary table showing the winner at the top: “no instructions but useful if you know your way around a spreadsheet.”
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➠ Votecount Only—No definitions by Paul Keating
“I wrote this spreadsheet primarily to keep track of my score, on my phone, so that having to deal will come as no surprise. ”
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➠ Definition sorter by Paul Keating
Some dealers like to arrange definitions by length to make the list look attractive. You can use this spreadsheet to do that quickly. Paste your definitions in Column A of the first tab called By Length. The four tabs will then provide different orderings. The sort is by character count, so two definitions that are close in length may appear in an unexpected order when displayed in anything other than a fixed-width font.
Once there were dedicated dealer support programs of varying degrees of sophistication, but the authors either retired from the game, or the programs were overwhelmed by changing technology, or both, and so all of the dealer support software listed below is no longer supported, though two of them can still be downloaded. They are for retro-computing fans only.
➠ Coryphæus by Paul Keating
The last major release of Coryphæus was in 2009, when active support ceased. It still had one or two users until 2016, and had its own support website at Yahoo Groups, from which it could still be downloaded. But Yahoo closed Yahoo Groups at the end 2019, and despite promises to the contrary, did not make the group contents available for download. So the site has disappeared.
➠ Dixomatic by Marijke van Gans
Author’s blurb: “Dixomatic automates some of the drudgery of dealing. Save defs and votes received to two files, and Dixomatic takes it from there. Harvest defs and votes interactively, edit defs, rearrange and combine them, handle DPs, generate outgoing messages. Can handle CompuServe, internet email and newsgroup style messages.”
Marijke died on 21 April 2009. She was 53.
Version 1.03ß, as uploaded to CompuServe, 6 October 2004. Runs on practically any legacy PC platform: “even runs on Windows 3.1.” Will not run on a 32-bit or 64-bit system without a 16-bit DOS emulator such as DOSBox or Virtual Box. Download.
➠ Autodealer by Froma Bessel
The original dealer support program. A DOS application that requires its users to hand-edit the input to look like a Tapcis .msg file, and does not know about Windows printer drivers.
No longer supported: Froma retired from the game in 2002.
Rev 1.3, as uploaded to CompuServe, 31 Jan 1999. Posted here because some players still used it into the Windows era, and may occasionally need a fresh copy. Download. Will not run on a 32-bit or 64-bit system without a 16-bit DOS emulator: it has been tested with DOSBox 0.74 (available from www.dosbox.com).