I recently bought a book, (to help tart up my annual calendar)
EXCEL 2000 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach
One of the accompanying example worksheets on the CD-ROM is ‘Guitar.xls’
Its brilliant, and genuinely useful. It depicts a 24 fret fingerboard with notes of a scale marked on it at the correct positions.
You can change the tuning of the strings to anything you want, and the fretboard display adjusts to show the new finger positions.
It has three banks of buttons.
The first allows you to select the key you want.
A, A# (Bb), C, C# (Db) D, D# (Eb), E, F, F# (Gb), G, G# (Ab).
The second allows you to select the Scale/Mode you want.
BLUES SCALE
DORIAN
HARMONIC MINOR
LOCRIAN
LYDIAN
MAJOR
MAJOR PENTATONIC
MELODIC MINOR
MINOR PENATONIC
MIXOLYDIAN
NATURAL MINOR
PHRYGIAN
WHOLE TONE
There is a SCALES INFO button. When clicked, this displays details about the scale/mode currently shown, and advises on what type of chords it could be applied over.
The third is DISPLAY OPTIONS, permitting the choice of either sharps (#) or flats ( on the neck display.
An embedded menu allows changing of the fingerboard colour.
Brilliant. Wish I could have had something like this when I was a nipper.
Forget spreadsheets, Excel was made for this.
I got my copy from amazon/bargainbookstores for about £10