Excel WC2018 prediction template

[Peter Bartholomew]

I co-developed an Excel template for recording predicted results for the FIFA World Cup competition which is just about to start (apparently the number of downloads has hit 70,000 and counting).

https://www.spreadsheet1.com/fifa-world-cup-2018-russia-free-prediction-templates-for-excel.html

I have since noticed some pretty extensive analysis on some Chinese sites.

http://www.excelhome.net/lesson/animation/excel/1902.html
http://club.excelhome.net/thread-1419297-1-1.html

Is anyone aware of the sites and are the bloggers active outside the Chinese language forums?

 

[Lori]

Great looking template - need to get predictions in quick!

Those Chinese language forums have great material (if you can find a decent translation of them) and may be some way ahead of the English ones on level of knowledge. See this thread for example:

http://club.excelhome.net/thread-681243-1-1.html

'First of all, I was very grateful to piny for discovering the usage of INDEX+N+IF (link), making the easy-to-use INDEX more powerful. [...] This usage of INDEX makes the return value of INDEX array usage "integrated" [...] so it can replace LOOKUP to a certain extent, or even more...'

The excelxor author then blogged about this fundamental insight several years later after picking it up from a Chinese user on one of the English forums.

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

I had read that the concept array coercion originated on a Chinese website. Google translate seems to struggle with Chinese (either that or the blogger has a highly idiosyncratic style), perhaps there is greater ambiguity in the way ideas are expressed?

I wonder what the blogger might have added if he had found that the group scores were held as 4x4 arrays and the processing is entirely array-based.

e.g. matches won
= MMULT( SIGN( score.array > TRANSPOSE(score.array) ), eachTeam )

The approach that I took to produce the template is what causes me problems here. My spreadsheet coding is not attempting to communicate with the user in terms of cell references and formulas. The vocabulary I try to reproduce in my use of names is the terminology or the problem domain, not Excel.

My approach of "you are either a developer creating a solution or you are a user who has no need to even know the resulting app is built on Excel as a platform", does not fit the needs of a help forum that readily.