While I was working Denmark, there is one thing I noticed. Danes are one hell of football lovers. The football (soccer) enthusiasm is over the top when there is a match between Denmark and Sweden.
A common practice in many offices is a football pool. This is how it works:
- When there is a match between 2 countries, say Denmark and Sweden, the pool will be open.
- You can bet any amount on any goal combination (say 10 Kr on 1-2 Denmark vs. Sweden)
- Your name is written against the cell combination that denotes 1-2
- Once the match is over, the people who guessed the scores right will share the total pool money
- No matter who wins, everyone drinks a few beers and gossip about the match
Since FIFA 2010 Worldcup is around the corner, I thought it might be fun to create a football betting sheet template in excel that all football lovers can use to bet.
Download the football betting sheet template
Here is how it works:
- Select both countries from drop-downs
- Specify the names of people against goal combinations (for. eg. if Stacey bets for 1-2, her name will be against row 2 and column 3).
- Now, take a printout of this
- Watch the match
- Distribute the money to winners
- Repeat!

As a bonus, you can see the flags of country based on selection. This mild awesomeness uses excel camera tool.
Go ahead and download the file. I bet that you are going to enjoy the file, even if you don’t bet. 😛
More football madness: Balls used in Fifa Worldcups since 1930 – Visualization.

















8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good