Creating & using character sheets

For a game I'm thinking of running, I need to be able to upload a "character sheet" that represents a players ship, including things like hull health, sail health, crew numbers, sail states, movement speed, crew actions etc. I can make the sheet in excel, but I don't know how to get said sheet into my game. any advice?

You can create the ship as a Character in the Journal and use Attributes to record its statistics. Is your data more complicated than just a list of statistics?

yes. hull/rigging/health is recorded in boxes, which are "hit" or "repaired" during play, and ship's speed changes based on wind speed and which direction the ship is facing relative to the wind. Additionally, crew quality (which can change based on morale checks) determines changes to damage dealt at various ranges and how quickly they perform things like repairs, preparing to board / repel boarders, etc.. It needs to be an almost fully editable document.

How are you using the Tabletop? This sounds like the sort of thing I'd create a diagram of the ship for, and put it on the Tabletop. Draw boxes which you can draw checks or crosses in as the ship takes damage. Find the image of a compass rose, then rotate it as the ship changes direction. Indicate wind direction with another arrow image which also rotates over the compass rose. Make the arrow a token so you can record wind speed in one of its bars. Make the ship diagram a token so you can record ship's speed in one of its bars and crew quality in another. You can make all this as simple or as fancy as you like, from a simple ship-outline to an elaborate photo-realistic, top-down image on a background of water and waves. If it's big enough you can even put the players' tokens on it as a map. Select and copy the whole thing to create another ship nearly instantly.

how would that work, out of curiosity? i'll be the first to admit I'm fairly new to roll 20. To put it in perspective though, theres 4 "sets" of damage boxes denoting what sail states / hull condition ship operates in the largest ship in the game, the spanish 130 gun 1st rate, will have boxes that look like this Rigging 9-9-9-9 Hull 12-12-12-12 Crew 12-12-12-12 Marine 10 whereas smaller ships, like a british 5th rate may look more like this Rigging 4-5-5-5 Hull 6-6-7-7 Crew-2-3-3-3 Marine 2 When I looked at the token, it gave me the option for 3 bars of user defined levels. If I was going with bars, I'd need 13 of them.  Thoughts?  P.S. thank you for your time, I appreciate it.

I take it that as you take damage, a marker moves to the left along the row of damage boxes? There are lots of ways you could implement this. Some ideas: Draw an image of the Rigging boxes with their numbers in an external image editor and save it. Mark the rightmost box as in effect and save that as a separate image. Reload the unmarked image and mark the next box, then save that as a new image. Do this for every box for Rigging. Then create a Rollable Table in which each saved image is one result of the table. Roll the table and put the result onto the Tabletop. You can now right-click the resultant Token and choose which "side" of the token you want. Whenever the rigging takes damage, choose the side showing the correct damage. Repeat for each other box. Use the drawing tools in Roll20 to draw boxes next to the rigging, side of the ship, and so forth, and then to type numbers in those boxes. You can then indicate which box is in effect either by drawing on the box or creating a marker Token which you move over the correct box. Capture an image of the damage boxes from your rule book and upload that as an image to the Tabletop. Then mark boxes either by using the drawing tools or with another marker image you add. You can add as many images to the Tabletop as you like; they don't all have to be maps and objects in those maps. You can add charts and text and scenery and any other props you like. You could show images of an hourglass to indicate time running out; periodically you switch to an image where the sand is lower in the glass. You can build gauges with transparent windows (using transparent layers in PNG images) with readouts behind them. You can text or alerts on the GM layer and bring them to the Token layer when the players need to see them. Use your ingenuity.

Quite awhile ago, I was working on a tabletop miniatures style game for tall ship combat and sailing. Not quite as complicated but I was needing more than three bars to store information. I came up with multiple tokens that represent different data on a character sheet. Only the ship token was the mobile one, whereas, the other tokens were off to the side. I was going to use macros on the sheet to do rolls and calculations, pulling info off of the sheet and sending the result to chat where the info can be manually entered wherever appropriate. I'm not sure if this helps.  You can also use the status markers of each token (like the dots or the icons) to represent data - they can have numbered values from 0-9, and the auras as well although the auras require token editing. None of these are linked to the sheet, though.

Wow, great Ideas from both of you! I think this is going to end up being more complicated then I thought. I had thought I'd just be able to upload an excel spreadsheet for each player to use and change as they saw fit. I think I may have to combine roll20 with google docs or google hangouts in order to accomplish what I'd thought.  This game is fairly complicated, and it sounds like the amount of effort I'd have to go to in order to make this work in roll20 as I'd planned is astonishing. The things I've listed only include about 1/2 of the changeable characteristics of ship movement and combat. Damage dealt goes down as crew sections are lost, or morale checks are failed. Guns can be dismounted, or falling rigging can obscure broadsides. The wheel can be shot away or the rudder destroyed, which greatly affects ship's movement and turning radius. Boarding involves lots of math. (in person, it's not as complicated as it sounds, but I think changing it to a computer simulation would be somewhat tricky) thanks again for all the help, but I think I bit off more than I can chew. I'll find a workaround.

When you've got that much information to handle, most people just send their players links to a spreadsheet on Google. No harm in doing that. But there's no way to view or edit spreadsheets from inside  Roll20. To give you a good idea of the capabilities of Roll20, think of it as a computerized version of an actual tabletop game. That is, whatever you can do with paper and pencils and dice and figures you can do in Roll20 in the same way. If you were to set up your game in real life, you'd need to do a ton of setup to keep track of everything. Same with Roll20. You've got to lay out your ship diagram, make and arrange your damage boxes, fill in all the values, move markers around as ships take damage. Each element in Roll20 (more or less) has a real-world analog. In the real world your tabletop won't automatically calculate all your ship's status codes for you, and neither will Roll20. There are exceptions to the above, but it seems to largely be the design philosophy of Roll20. Reproduce a game table in a web browser.