Automated Football Results.

Our local pub runs a football competition throughout the season. Choose four teams from the four leagues then add up their league positions to get a total. To do this for seventy odd people so they know how they’re doing was an onerous task that took Chrismouse a couple of hours every week; that’s eighty hours over the season. Chrismouse needed a spreadsheet. Stiffmouse to the rescue! Well it seemed simple enough. After some evaluation it wasn’t. How do you get from data on a website to a list of people’s scores to post up in the pub? I started learning about Look-ups, Macros and how to write Visual Basic. Did all that and by week one I’d got it working and sent it to Chrismouse with considerable pride. Week two and it crumbled into dust. Got it working again, sent it off again and then dust again. And again. My file was acquiring so many suffixes of variants it ran to two paragraphs and Chrismouse was loosing confidence. Breakthrough. The BBC data was screwing things up. It was getting bigger and bigger as more matches were played. More learning, more rewriting of macros and bam it was conquered. By this point I couldn’t put it down so went for the ultimate, buttons. Yes you can put user buttons on spreadsheets, just click and they’ll do anything you want. So now all Chrismouse has to do is copy/paste data, press the appropriate button, repeat and press the Results button. It should take him around 80 seconds. That’s seventy-nine hours, six minutes, forty seconds saved every year, and I’m two weeks older.