Excel Tips from the Best 2021 March Madness Brackets

After a year hiatus it’s finally here, the college basketball March Madness brackets are back! Last year, I made a NFL Draft Game spreadsheet for the first time to try to compensate for the loss of the basketball brackets but it just wasn’t the same (but I did still update it for 2021). This year, the 2021 NCAA men's basketball tournament will be unlike any March Madness that has come before. All games will be played in Indiana, with most in Indianapolis. The schedule has also been change. The First Four would typically be played on Tuesday and Wednesday night with the first round being played on Thursday and Friday. 

Here's the 2021 March Madness schedule:

• First Four — 4 p.m. start on Thursday, March 18
• First round — 12 p.m. start on Friday, March 19, and Saturday, March 20
• Second round — 12 p.m. start on Sunday, March 21, and Monday, March 22
• Sweet 16 — 2 p.m. start on Saturday, March 27, and 1 p.m. start on Sunday, March 28
• Elite Eight — 7 p.m. start on Monday, March 29, and 6 p.m. start on Tuesday, March 30
• Final Four — 5 p.m. start on Saturday, April 3
• NCAA championship game — 9 p.m. Monday, April 5

Once again, I will be using the best March Madness brackets in Excel, created by David Tyler (and I will continue to use his until he decides to no longer update them). They’re very polished and easy to use. There are only 68 teams in the field but the spreadsheet is already setup to handle up to 128 teams, if they expand in the future. There are two sheets: the bracket and the pool manager. Instructions are included but its very intuitive. 

The First 5 Things I Do When Examining Someone Else's Spreadsheet

As I’ve said countless times before, you can learn a lot by looking at templates made by others. Here are 5 things I do when examining a new spreadsheet:

1. Unhide hidden sheets, columns, and rows: When you make a template others are going to be using, you want to make it look nice and clean and hide anything that could cause confusion to a first time user, which leads to hiding rows, columns, or even entire sheets in a workbook. So, the first thing I do when examining someone else’s template is look for the hidden data. Right click on the sheets tab and click “unhide”. I unhide all the hidden sheets if there are any to see what data is present. Look for any hidden columns or rows as well by seeing if any letters or numbers are skipped.

2. Understand the NamedRanges: Go To Formulas > Name Manager and examine what the named ranges are, what sheets and cells they refer to. Hopefully they're all named well, like in David's brackets.

3. Look at conditional formatting rules: On the Home tab, go to Conditional Formatting, click Manage Rules, then Show formatting rules for This Worksheet to view them all.

4. Look through the formulas: On the Formulas tab, click “show Formulas” to show if they were manually typed in or if there is a formula calculating the values

5. Look through the macros: Hopefully, the person writing the code left lots of good comments so it’s easier to follow along with what each piece of code does

Watch me quickly walk through David's 2021 March Madness brackets going through the five points listed above:

2021 NFL Draft Game Spreadsheet Template

It’s been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Last year, since March Madness and other sports at the time were cancelled, I started thinking about what other things I could do to fill in the void of not having any March Madness brackets to fill out. The answer came in a suggestion from a reader to create an NFL Draft game spreadsheet. I’ve updated the template for this year.

Inside this template I've listed the top 100 draft prospects according to ESPN. Each draft game player (and the template is currently setup to handle ten players) are randomly assigned ten future NFL players by using a randomize macro. The earlier your players get drafter the better, as the draft position counts for points and the lowest number of points wins!

The random number macro is pretty simple:

'define range of cells for random numbers

Dim Player1 As Range

Set Player1 = Range("AN2:AN101")

Player1.ClearContents

For Each a In Player1

Do

a.Value = (Int((100 * Rnd + 1)))

Loop Until WorksheetFunction.CountIf(Player1, a.Value) < 2

Next

Based on some good user feedback I added the option where each player can now try to predict which team will select their players for additional bonus points. Well, negative bonus points that is, as it subtracts points from your total score (remember, lowest score wins).

See how the Draft Game spreadsheet works in the video below:

Even if you have no interest in the NFL, football, or drafts, you can still learn a bit about Excel by examining the random number generator macro, or the vlookup and sumif formulas used. The scoreboard uses a “rank without ties” formula:

 =(IF(D3<>"",(RANK(D3,$D$3:$D$52)+COUNTIF(D$3:D3,D3)-1),""))

For now, the spreadsheet is setup to handle ten players. To add more, the formulas and macro will need to be modified. If enough people are interested in using this sheet, I will work on making it scalable so it can automatically adjust to the exact number of players.

2021 NFL Draft Game Spreadsheet Template.xlsm 

Let me know if you like this game or if you have any suggestions or questions.

COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracking Template

Not sure if this is helpful to anyone but I made a COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Tracking document in Excel. It’s hard to make a spreadsheet that you’re probably not going to use personally yourself. But I tried to envision being in management of a company or nursing home or school that needed to:

 (1) prioritize which employees or residents or teachers should get the vaccine first and

 (2) track which people have actually gotten the vaccine and when.

 

What Order to Distribute the Vaccine

The first item I tackled was how do you decide in what order to give out the vaccine. Knowing that supplies are limited, who gets the first dose?

I use a scoring system to decide the priority order: the highest score is first in line to get their shots.

 Here’s how the score is calculated:

1. Age: the score starts with the person’s age. 30 years old = 30 points. The older population automatically has a higher score.
2. Age multiplier: I made up a tier system based on age. Based on earlier data I’ve seen, the chance of dying from COVID if you’re 59 years or younger is only around 1% or less, but this jumps up to nearly 20% if you’re 80 or older. In my scoring system, those 60 and older get varying amounts of “bonus” points added to their score depending on what age range tier they fall into.
3. Priority person: Yeah, you could just rank vaccination order by age and be done with it but I didn’t want age to be the only limiting factor. There are other variables that I wanted to account for. I added the ability for a person to be marked as “high priority”, maybe due to immune deficiency or because they’re a first responder, or pregnant – whatever you want it to be. This adds 11 points to their score to help bump them up in the distribution order. Again, the spreadsheet is easily customizable so you can change the bonus to whatever value fits your needs.
4. Male or female: This might be controversial, but I added a segment to the scoring where males get a slight score increase over females. From the data I have (and please send me any new information if you think I’m wrong) males have a ~3% higher death rate from COVID than females (women are generally better at fighting off infections I’ve heard) so they get +3 point bonus while females get none. Of course, feel free to change this setting to make it what you want. Give woman 1,000 bonus points and men 0 – it’s up to you and can be easily changed in the spreadsheet.

The total score is calculated by adding up the age, the age tier multiplier, the male/female bonus, and the priority bump. The biggest factor is age, as that is the biggest factor of death rate. While getting the highest score means you’re first in line to get the vaccine, that also means you have the highest risk of dying from COVID.  I then use the RANK function in Excel to rank the individuals from highest to lowest score. There’s your priority list of who gets the vaccine first.

Vaccine Distribution Tracking

The next component, after deciding the vaccination order, is to then track if these people actually got the vaccine. Complicating matters, there are (right now) two different vaccines being distributed in the US requiring two separate doses and the time between doses is different. Each vaccine also has a minimum age requirement that is different so there is a formula to make sure the individual is old enough to get the selected vaccine. If they’re not eligible, meaning you’re too young, your score automatically goes to 0 and I use condition formatting to turn the cells black to show the individual shouldn’t be scheduled to get a shot. Once you get the first dose, enter the date and the spreadsheet will tell you when the earliest is you can get the second dose based on which vaccine you got. Finally, you can quickly see how many of your employees or residents have received the first or second doses of the vaccine.

 Download the spreadsheet here: https://gumroad.com/l/covid-tracker

I’ve been wanting to put my Excel powers to good use rather than just making Super Bowl squares or football related spreadsheets. Not sure the legality of it but if I was in charge of a company with employees working from home I would want to know when it is safe to bring that back into the office. Try it out and let me know what you think!

2021 Super Bowl Squares Spreadsheet – the only template you’ll ever need

I’ve been creating Super Bowl Squares spreadsheets for ten years now. Every January I’d update the template and add more sheets with more ways to play. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a bit of a mess when opening the workbook and seeing all these different colored tabs with similar yet different names. It was getting annoying dealing with multiple game boards, multiple score managers, etc. and probably very confusing to new users. 

The old version of the Super Bowl Squares template

I’ve had an idea for streamlining and improving the grid game spreadsheet for over two years but just finally had enough time and energy to work on it before the actual Super Bowl. It’s taken many hours of work setting up the macros and testing all of the conditions but it’s finally ready: the new and improved Super Bowl Squares template is here!

When you first open the template you’ll notice the big changes right off the bat. You’re met with a simple setup screen where the user will decide how to play the game. The sheet automatically updates the Super Bowl boxes and the leaderboard to reflect only the version of the game you want to play. 

I used to have to update the sheet every year by inputting the teams and their helmets. This time, all the teams and helmets are in one of the sheets. Simply use the drop down lists in the Squares sheet to select the team from the list (broken up by AFC and NFC) and their helmets will update automatically! 

Watch me demo the new Super Bowl board in the video below:

As you can see, the new sheet allows more ways to play but is simple and easy to setup and is automated as much as possible. 

Get the Super Bowl pool template here.

Even if you’re not into football, you can still use the template to learn how to do these Excel tricks:

• Lookup pictures based on cell values
• Generate random numbers
• Use NameManager
• Create drop down lists
• Use index and match formulas

If you dissect the macros in the spreadsheet you’ll learn how to:

• Hide rows and columns
• Hide or unhide sheets
• Generate random numbers between 0 and 9 with no duplicates
• How to hide command buttons by VBA
• How to change cell fill color

Update 1-19-2021

I've updated the spreadsheet again. There are now 54 ways to play within one slick spreadsheet. I added options to play by quarters, every minute, or every time the score changes. Watch me preview the update below. Also be sure to subscribe to my email list and YouTube channel as I'll be showing off all the tricks and tips I used to make this spreadsheet work.

*Intended for PC/Microsoft Office/Excel. I don't think it will work in Mac Numbers*

Get it here (enter a 0 into the price box then input an email address):

https://gumroad.com/l/superbowlsquares

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you. Is this version as much of an upgrade and easy to use as I think it is? I welcome any and all questions, comments, suggestions, cuss words, and compliments. Let me know using the comments below or via email. Enjoy playing Super Bowl Squares!

2020 College Football Bowl Prediction Pool

The college football conference championships were played this past weekend which means the 2020 NCAA college football bowl season is here again! Therefore, it’s time to make your picks and predictions about who you think will win each bowl game. One of the best times of the holiday season (other than giving and receiving gifts) is getting on Zoom with your family and friends (to maintain social distancing) to cheer for your Alma mater or hometown football team. This year has the added bonus of not just single bowl games but the seventh year of a four team playoff to determine the national champion.

Features for this year's bowl prediction pool over the previous college football bowl pool manager spreadsheets include the following:

• Easy method to make each bowl game worth a different point value, so the national championship game and semi-finals can be worth more points, or however you want to customize it.
• Updated leaderboard tab with new stats
• Separate entry sheet to pass out to participants or co-workers that can be imported automatically by a built-in macro
• Complete NCAA college football bowl schedule with game times and TV stations
• New stat sheet to track each conference's record during bowl season 
• The bowl prediction sheets include the football helmet designs for every team (taken from the 2017 college football helmet schedule spreadsheet), their win-loss record, and the logo for all bowl games. I added the helmets so those players who aren't big college football fans can pick a winner based on their favorite helmet design!
• Download the CFP Pool Manager and Single Entry Form here.

How to Enter Player's Picks into the Bowl Sheet

There are now three ways to add participant’s data:

• Manual entry using the drop down lists
• Copy and paste from the selection sheet to the bowl manager
• Use the import macro to automatically import a player’s data into the pool manager by way of a macro

The beauty of this football bowl manager is you will not have to change or modify any formulas yourself (unless you want to of course). Instructions are included within the Excel file and shows you exactly how to add more players (either manually or by using the button that is linked to a macro). If you enjoy using this sheet football pool manager I would really appreciate it if you would share it with friends, family, and coworkers.

I am working a version where you can add confidence picks by ranking the bowls in order of how confidence you are with your picks. I did one for 2017 but have not updated 2019's for this yet. Let me know in the comments or via email if this is something you would be interested in.

Cancelled Bowl Games (as of 12/20)

• Tropical Smoothie Cafe Frisco Bowl
• LA Bowl
• Bahamas Bowl (C-USA vs. MAC)
• Celebration Bowl (MEAC vs. SWAC)
• Fenway Bowl (AAC vs. ACC)
• Hawaii Bowl (AAC vs. Mountain West)
• Holiday Bowl (ACC vs. Pac-12)
• Las Vegas Bowl (Pac-12 vs. SEC)
• Los Angeles Bowl (Pac-12 vs. Mountain West)
• Pinstripe Bowl (ACC vs. Big Ten)
• Quick Lane Bowl (ACC, Big Ten, MAC)
• Redbox Bowl (Big Ten vs. Pac-12)
• Sun Bowl (ACC vs. Pac-12)
• Birmingham Bowl
• Military Bowl
• Guaranteed Rate Bowl
• Radiance Tech Bowl

College Football Bowl Game Trivia

• 56 teams
• 28 bowl games (plus the national championship)
• Teams with double digit wins: 5 (in 2019 there were 22 teams with 10 wins or more)
• Teams with losing records: 9 (last year in 2019 there were zero teams with losing record)
• Only 3 teams with .500 records (13 last year in 2019). Wisconsin is fewest wins of those at 3-3
• Average number of games played: 9
• Team that played the most games: Georgia Southern (12), Georgia State (12)
• Team that played the least games: Colorado (5)
• Team with the worst record: South Carolina (2-8)
• Team with the best record: Alabama (11-0), Coastal Carolina (11-0)
• Average win pct.: 68%
• Most lopsided: UAB (6-3) vs South Carolina (2-8), NC State (8-3) vs Kentucky (4-6)
• Matchup with most combined wins: Alabama (11-0) vs Notre Dame (10-1)
• SEC leads all conferences with 12 teams represented, followed by Conference USA with 7. 
• At least 20 teams have opted out of post-season play, including Stanford, Florida State, PSU, USC, UCLA, and more.
• Army (9-2) has not been able to find a team to play (as of 12/20)
• 17 Bowl games have been cancelled

My Thoughts on the 2020 College Football Bowl Season

On one hand, I should be happy we're even getting to watch football. On the other hand, this is by far the worst bowl matchups since I've been following college football. 10-1 BYU gets rewarded by playing 6-3 UCF? 11-0 Coastal Carolina play Liberty (who???) instead of a big name school. Who wants to watch a 2-8 team play in a bowl game?

And don't even get me started on the college football playoff. The NCAA passed up a gold opportunity in my opinion. They had a free pass this year to experiment with the playoff to try to improve it by making an expanded field with the opportunity for more exciting match-ups (most of the first round games have been duds). Instead we're going to get blow out losses by Ohio State and Notre Dame and get Alabama versus Clemson for the national championship AGAIN. BoRiNg. And this is coming from an Ohio State fan. How does Cincinnati not even get considered? All the non-power five schools might as well go make their own conference because they're never getting into a 4 team playoff.

Download the 2020 - 2021 CFP Bowl Prediction Pool Manager.xlsm file here

Gift Guide for Excel Users 2020

The 2020 holiday season is officially upon us here in the United States which means it’s time for my annual gift giving guide. I used to panic every year whenever my spouse, parents, and siblings asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I needed to give them an idea otherwise I’d end up with an ugly sweater or some random gadget I would never use.

So to help alleviate some of my stress I started compiling my own holiday gift guide. It’s kind of like the big toy catalog you used to get as a kid, only this is for adults. I’ve made a list of items I think would be very useful or exciting for your fellow Excel users, sorted by different categories. Some of these items I already use on a daily basis and others are things that are on my own personal wish list. It's my biggest and best gift guide yet! Enjoy!

2020 NFL Helmet Schedule Spreadsheet

 I wasn't planning on updating the NFL Helmet Schedule spreadsheet this year. I've been feeling kind of down due to the pandemic and the affects it has had on all my hobbies. Especially with the cancellation (sorry, "delay") of some college football leagues like the Big Ten. Plus, I thought the prospect of the entire season happening is somewhat slim. So I was leaning towards not updating the sheet this year.

Then I checked my email.

I received a message from longtime reader Brent Foreman with an attachment: a fully updated 2020 NFL Helmet Schedule spreadsheet and a note "Just a little way that I can say thanks for your posts over the years."

Wow. Amazing. Made my day.

So thanks to Brent the spreadsheet is updated and now available to download.

Use this link to download the NFL schedule spreadsheet. 

Please note, an email is required to download it. I do this so you will be automatically updated you if changes or additions are made and will update you when the next year’s schedule is ready. I do not use your email for anything else.

Here's a video of an older sheet to show you how it's formatted:

Thanks again to Brent.


As you can see, the NFL helmet schedule is printable too. You can save the spreadsheet as a PDF file or print it out and pin it up in your cubicle at work. If you do, please email or tweet me a picture of it hanging up - I'd love to see it!

As always, I welcome any comments or suggestions about how to fix or improve the sheet! How can I improve this football spreadsheet into something you’ll use all the time during pro-football season? What future features would you like to see?