Don't use the character sheet. Take advantage of modern printers to provide a clear hierarchy on more paper to make for faster lookup. More information *density* actually reduces lookup time. A larger sheet with better headers will reduce lookup time relative to a dense sheet.

First, there's no limit to space. While photocopied pages have limits as to space, we live in a computer mediated age. Unpack your character sheet onto multiple pages. Make each page relate to itself with a clear header. Copy and paste rules that you frequently will want to refer to onto the page itself. Include sections of the character sheet on each page as a mnemonic.

In my classes, however, one of the test preparation strategies that I recommend is the creation of a cheat sheet *by hand.* While transcribing this into a computer form is commonly done for legibility, the act of writing, I have observed, helps my students remember, if only because it *takes more time.*

Make cheat sheets for every aspect of your character. Highlight the cheat sheet with many different colours, and colour your character sheet (and expanded character sheet) with the same colours.

Between colour indexing, clear headers on your expanded sheets, a page full of "[key-value pairs][1]" for frequent numerical lookups by name, and a hand-written cheat sheet to internalise the mechanics of your character, you won't *need* to rote-memorize your character sheet: you'll understand it instead.


  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute%E2%80%93value_pair