How the Ultimate World Cup 2010 Spreadsheet Came to Be

In 2006 I stumbled across an incredible spreadsheet just before the World Cup in Germany. It was attractive, slick, and very easy to use. Tracking the progress of teams through the World Cup became a lot more enjoyable, no even riveting.

Fast forward four years... along comes World Cup 2010 in South Africa. I contacted the original author of the Ultimate Couch Potato World Cup 2006 Spreadsheet to see if he was going to do an update. The answer was "No, it takes much to much time, but you can take it over if you wish." Well, to make a long story short, I took over the project, but in the course of asking questions about functionality the original author became involved again! Yay! After 3 weeks we had it finished, albeit still a bit rough.

Unfortunately we also had to redo the website completely (in terms of visual effect, not content), and then find ways to publicize it.

What makes this spreadsheet unique among World Cup spreadsheets? Well, it is really the only one in its niche. This Excel Spreadsheet has 7 pages and is 1.8 megabytes. Smaller spreadsheets exist, but they are only one page, looking cramped and gaudy. Then there are a couple of well known larger ones 8 to 12 megabytes. These have another problem - they are overkill. There is so much extraneous information that one can page through that one looses sight of the goal (almost literally!). They also have not learned anything about user-friendliness and visual appeal. I find using these irksome and annoying. Finally, the spreadsheet that we created uses only formulas. It has no macros or VBA programming, so there is no chance of getting a virus from it.

One of the labour intensive features is a set of unique comments for each match. There are 7 basic comments - for when team A beats team B by 1,2,or 3+ goals, when they tie, and when B beats A by 1, 2 or 3+ goals. Seven times 48 games is 336 comments. However, things are a lot more complicated then they seem. Virtually every comment has additional options in it - depending whether the tie is 0-0 (no goals scored) or 1-1 (where some goals are scored). We also take into consideration when teams are eliminated and who they have to play next in their group. This makes over 1000 permutations for the group stage comment section. Whew!

Will this spreadsheet be continued in for the 2014 world cup? We'll have to wait and see. We may need more help with doing this.