Follow the World Cup with this Excel spreadsheet
February 23rd, 2010
Among his many other talents, my brother Dan is a spreadsheet expert. While I think I’m pretty good at developing spreadsheets for Emerge’s different business units, Dan knows short cut keys, formulas, macros, pivot tables, conditional formatting, you name it. So, when he sends me a Excel file and says it is worth looking at, I stop what I’m working on and take a look.
This morning he sent World-Cup-2010.xls(1.6MB) from flesport.com. The perfect companion for those who plan to immerse themselves in this summer’s World Cup (June 11 – July 11 from South Africa).
In the spreadsheet, you simply enter the score of each game and Excel does everything else. It automatically
- Tallies up the standings in each of the 6 groups (division)
- Color codes the team that wins each game
- Updates the tournament brackets with the winning teams
Deciding the winning team might sound easy, but in World Cup soccer, each team plays just 3 games in the group stage and the top 2 out of 4 teams in the group advance to the knockout stage. So, it isn’t difficult for two or more teams to have the same record (for example each team could have 1 win, 1 lose and 1 tie). Not to worry, the spreadsheet implements the official World Cup tie breakers to solve this:
- Points
- Goal Difference
- Goals Scored
- Concerned teams (Points, Goals For minus Goals Against, Goals For)
As if that wasn’t enough, the spreadsheet enables you to set your language (English, German, French, Spanish and Russian) and set your time zone so that all game times display correctly in your part of the world.
Enjoy the games. Go USA.
