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Hi Alistair,
Many thanks for the comments. I am certainly happy to put some time into preparing a guide if there are some people like yourself who think they could make use of it, either for their own personal use or for sessions with friends or the public.
Having put the formulas into spreadsheet form, the core calculation part is now easy to modify - I have flagged the three places where that is needed on the first sheet in red - LAT, LONG and DISPLAY TIME (UT).
However, the charting step in Excel is a manual one, so it would be up to people to generate the charts for their location and time and add whatever labels they wish to enhance the readability of the chart.
In my case for example the constellation lines and boundaries are mostly a nuisance on a chart, but there are some (such as the Taurus triangle, the false cross in Carina/Vela, Crux, the Sagittarius 'teapot' and the Orion 'saucepan') that are instantly recognisable and are helpful both to me and people less familiar with the night sky. This part is very much a matter of personal preference.
When it comes down to it, I suspect (or at least hope) there is a category of astronomy buff who like me is familiar with spreadsheets, though not in the league of designing and programming a fully fledged star application, but happy to spend the time creating and customising a set of easily readable charts for their location and set of 'interesting objects'.
I do have another version of the spreadsheet that calculates the ALT AZ for any member or pair of members in my table of objects in real time just by plugging in the object numbers should that be of interest for other purposes (such as calculating separation angles), but my main purpose in starting the thread here was to see what interest there is in the charting option.
Cheers,
Andrew
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