another question - i have never used the formula builder, how many do and what is the advantage/disadvantage vs just looking individually ranking the players.

Formula builder is great.  If you figure out to make it work for you, you really needn't do a lot of work afterword.

Cut and paste into a spreadsheet, then take maybe 10 minutes to identify my top 50-65 or so, depending on the qualiity of the board.  Then I'll spend maybe a half hour to rank the top position players from 1 to whatever in my spreadsheet, another half hour to rank the top pitchers from 1 to whatever in my spreadsheet, then another 20 minutes or so to merge the ranked hitters and pitchers together into a single 1 to whatever list, again only within my spreadsheet.

Quite often I'll do this final merge of the two lists (position and pitchers) on a different day from when the first two lists were ranked.  Gives me a bit of a fresh perspective and I'll sometimes find myself tweaking the original rankings.

I'll also pay special attention to the top "x" number of players in my merged list, depending on where my first round pick is.  I want to try to guarantee that I've got the first round pick solid.

Then I'll go through the rest of the position players for around 10 minutes to identify some depth to fill out my minor league rosters.  Add these guys at the end of the first list, then do a single session of doing the manual rankings in the game itself.

If I get all of this done with a couple of days to spare before the draft, I may do some final tweaking, but usually I feel that after I've done all of the above I have my rankings in as good a shape as possible.  Overanalyzing will make me nuts.

I also tend to set my second round on up to super duper aggressive, as I don't care of they draft an expensive guy to sign, I will pay for him there if he fell in the draft because others didn't want to foot the cash. or let him go back to vocational school.

I realized awhile ago, whether I take 30 minutes or 4 seconds my drafts are similar. So 4 years ago, I started using the 4 second formula builder approach.

First I copy all of the info into a speadsheet as a starting point before running any formulas or rankings.  I use this later to double check for guys I miss during manual rankings.  Next, I run the formula builder based on my hitting preferences.  This drops all of my pitchers to the bottom of the list.  I do that because good pitchers are easy to spot and I'd rather draft a decent hitter than a marginal pitcher.  My formula builder ranks the hitters to what I would prefer almost perfectly.  After that I start looking for guys to drop down - usually guys with higher OVR, but balanced skillsets because I like having specific weapons.  Then I find the best defensive guys and move them up.  I'd rather have a defensive specialist than a AAAA caliber pitcher.  Lastly, I find the pitchers I would consider drafting and move them to the appropriate spot.  I try to do this over a couple of hours the first 3 days or so after the list is released.  Then I spend about 10-15 minutes a day looking for ranking mistakes.

This is probably just about as successful as if I did nothing - especially when I'm drafting 60th or so....

I might be the only one but I manually go through each prospect.  I look for ratings below a certain threshhold in my own personal list of key categories and drop those players down to #500 after creating an artificial barrier with all of the low-level DH players so that I know every player below the gaggle of DHs is untouchable.  After that I manually rank the players above the DH group (usually 250 or so players.)  It's a slow process but I enjoy it.

i go through and get rid of the guys who won't sign.

then i go through and get rid of the guys with horrible health ratings

that takes about 5 mins.

then i try and rank my top 50 (depending on my picks) getting rid of low contorl pitchers and no power/no contact/no eye hitters.

takes about 15-25 minutes.

then i look for sleepers, low dur hitters or low stam pitchers with other good stats.

i also pump up a couple all D Catchers or pitchers to help fill in my minors.

i'll then tweak some...

so in all i use about an hour

I do those things as well...jettison low health, makeup, pitcher control, signability, etc.  Let somebody else get the player with a 13 work ethic.