People & websites that helped me in 2015 [thank you message]

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2015 has been the most awesome year since starting Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for making it happen. This year, more than 11 million people visited our site (up 8%), learned something and took first step to become awesome in their work. 2015 has been an amazing journey, thanks to all your visits, listens, purchases, comments, likes and shares.

A big thanks to you, my dear reader, for supporting me and choosing chandoo.org as partner in your journey to awesomeness.

Apart from our readers, there are also countless people, websites, books, companies which helped me have a fantastic year. This message is my way of saying thanks to them.

People who helped me in 2015

Teachers & gurus:

Running a small business focusing on knowledge requires a lot of training, help and mentoring. Thanks to all these wonderful people who motivated me, taught me, inspired me and corrected me in this year.

Excel folks:

Hui, Jon Peltier, Debra Dalgleish, Mike Alexander, Dick Kuslieka, Rob Collie, Bill Jelen, Jordon Goldmeir, Colin Legg, Mike Girvin, Francis Hayes, & David Hager

Forum members:

Hui, Luke, Narayank, Somendra, Deepak, Debraj, Khalid, Nebu, Asheesh and more.

Business & entrepreneurship:

Pat Flynn, MrMoneyMustache, Tim Ferriss and Tropical MBA.

Health & fitness:

My cycling buddies – Hemanth, Srinivas B, Srinivas C, Sandeep, Sridhar V, Sridhar B and more.

Authors & books

It has been a powerful & inspiring journey, thanks to all the books I could read.

Some of the authors & their books that inspired me are,

Note: all the book links are Amazon Affiliate links. That means, if you click and purchase a book thru above links, I will get a few cents from Amazon.

Partners, Affiliates & Supporters

Chandoo.org is able to reach out & help millions of users world wide because it stands on the shoulders of many giants & supporters.

Our partners:

PASS BA & Jen Stirrup:  Thank you so much for inviting me to speak at PASS BA 2015 conference. It was an awesome experience meeting all the Excel legends and PASS BA staff in Santa Clara this April.

Plum Solutions: Thank you Danielle for doing all the ground work to conduct another round of Excel & Power Pivot masterclasses in Australia in 2015. It was a great experience meeting our Australian readers & fans.

EduPristine: Thanks to Pawan, Paramdeep & rest of the staff at EduPristine for partnering with Chandoo.org in running Financial Modeling classes.

Our Affiliates:

This year was great for many of our affiliates too. Thanks to their support, we had more customers and they had more revenues. Some of our most prominent affiliates are,

Dashboard Spy, Francis, Daniel Ferry, Debra Dalgleish, Philip, Ken Puls, Oscar, Jimmy Pena, Victor Chan, Alan Murray, Brad Edgar and many more.

Customers & Readers

In 2015, more than 5,300 people purchased courses, templates, ebooks or products from Chandoo.org. More than 120,000 people are now members of our newsletter / RSS feed. More than 12,000 people regularly tune in to Chandoo.org podcast too. Many more people discover and join our little community every day. Thank you so much for inviting me to your life & letting me help you. My sincere & heart-felt thanks to each and every one of you.

Many thanks to Texas Mutual, University of Tasmania (Australia), Environmental Protection Agency – Ohio etc. for purchasing bulk licenses of our products.

I am also thankful to our Excel Forum members, who continue to share their knowledge & skills selflessly.

Special thanks also to,

  • Delegates of my Advanced Excel & Power Pivot Masterclasses in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane in Australia.
  • Delegates of the PASS BA conference in Santa Clara, USA
  • People who attended the meetups in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Thanks for spending a lovely evening with me talking about Excel 🙂
  • Leonie, Sunil, Habiba, Matt, Susan, Kurt and Danielle for your love, hospitality and warmth during my Australia visit this summer.
  • Rickard from Corality and Johann from ModelOff for taking a few minutes out of their schedules to meet me and share a drink.
  • Dan Fylstra for sharing his views and insights about Excel in a podcast interview.
  • Staff and editors at Apress who helped Jordan & me with our book – Dashboards for Excel.
  • Jeff Weir for all his wisdom, time & advice.
  • All Excel MVPs and bloggers who attended the PASS BA conference and made it a memorable experience for me. (here is more)
  • All our podcast listeners
  • Everyone who bought a copy of The VLOOKUP Book or Dashboards for Excel.
  • Mixergy, PC Magazine, InvestinTech for all press coverage and love.

Our staff

Chandoo.org staff are the silent soldiers helping me achieve our mission – “to make you awesome in Excel”. I am deeply thankful to their efforts & work ethic.

  • Ravindra: for handling student enrollments, customer support & email work
  • Joya: for creating podcast transcripts
  • Pothi: for maintaining Chandoo.org webservers and helping our site run smoothly
  • Narayan: for answering student questions & doubts
  • Chittibadrayya: for taking care of our accounting & financial reporting stuff
  • Jo (my wife): for helping me with customer support emails.

Companies & websites that helped me

I am thankful to Microsoft for creating Excel and helping me make a living out of it.

I am also thankful to,

Email & Productivity: Google, iPhone

Website, Hosting & E-commerce: WordPress, GoDaddy, Wishlist Member, KnownHost, Amazon, PayPal, E-Junkie2Checkout, EBS, GumRoad, FastSpring, Thesis, libsyn

Community & Connection: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Skydrive, pinterest

Software: Paint.NET, Mozy, Notepad ++, Camtasia & Snagit, Skype, Rescue Time, Audacity

Apps: Flipboard, Feedly, Amazon Kindle

There are many other software, companies and websites that help me every day. I am really thankful to each and every one of these. Detailed listing here.

Last but not least…

I am able to perform at my best levels & help you because there is someone else that support, encourage and inspire me every day.

  • My family: Jo & kids support me and Chandoo.org in numerous ways. They shower me with love, humor and support everyday so that I can be awesome at what I do.
  • All my close friends & relatives: for supporting me & encouraging me to do better.

PS… something for you:

Here is a nice little surprise for you. Open a new Excel 2013 or above file & in A1 type

=BASE(PRODUCT(5,7,83)&REPT(3,2)&REPT(6,2),6^2)
&" "&BASE(2^15-2424,3*12)&" "&BASE(PRODUCT(19,1877,5,3,3),4*9)

for older versions of Excel (2010 or prior):

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(8,10^2*2+3^2,4)&
"P"&ADDRESS(2^2,21^2,2^2)&
ADDRESS(16/4,SUBSTITUTE(1517,15,96),4)
&"Y"&ADDRESS(2*4,2424+1000,2*2),8,""),4," ")
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28 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup 2018 Excel Tracker – FREE Download”

  1. Andy F says:

    Good work as always - I liked the way you did the "menu" on the left hand side (although the buttons aren't lined up between tabs if I'm being ultra picky)

    Have you previously written about the method of extracting the Wikipedia page into Power Query? It's not something I recall seeing before.

    ps other geeky observsations:

    - the bracket columns are too narrow for the date & match number - and will need to be wider still when the team names get populated
    - match 51 should be Moscow (Luzhniki) for consistency
    - it's not possible to be 23 hours ahead of GMT - the International Dateline gets in the way! I think the maximum is 14. There are also a couple of countries who work to a quarter hour to make it really complicated!
    - There's a typo in the how-to - "compated" instead of compared

    • Chandoo says:

      Thanks for the lovely feedback. I have fixed almost all of them.

      1) button alignment: this is tricky as row heights can change between sheets.
      2) Column width is fixed now so bracket view looks better
      3) Updated the stadium name
      4) Did not bother with the 23 hours ahead thingie. This is more of a novelty feature 😛
      5) Fixed the type
      6) Fixed an issue with live score table. This should work as long as the points table is maintained in wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_FIFA_World_Cup

      7) I have not discussed the technique of reading all tables on webpage to one big table. Watch out for a blog post on this soon.

      • Andy F says:

        Button alignment is one for the ultra-OCD sufferers 😉 There are ways, but only for those with too much time on their hands.

        • Chandoo says:

          Aah, Excel. The perfect tool for people like us. Everything (cells) is in same shape and size by default and aligned perfectly. 😀

          • Etienne says:

            Is there actually a way to copy row heights (in the same way you copy column widths?)

            By the way Chandoo, great post. I'm forwarding to my department. I actually use another query from the same page to automatically fill in the team names for the knock-out stages (I made one for round of 16 which I then duplicated and edited for quarter-finals etc.) This is incredible, I was always wondering how to do these type of queries from the web, and now I know 🙂

  2. Jake says:

    Hello!

    This is quite amazing and incredibly cool to use 🙂

    Testing the constraints of this sheets a few errors popped I noticed:
    - Vlookup Group E-H refers to column J instead of E (eg. Brazil gets the same points as Russia because the formula looks up Russia twice)
    - Power query only has 29 lines, the overview of has 32 but the 3 countries from group A are lost as the overview is refreshed - causing N/A in the group stage colums

    • Chandoo says:

      @Jake.. thank you. I am sorry for the errors. I could not test the live points table until the games began. I see my folly now. I have fixed both issues and uploaded a new file. As the points table relies on a wikipedia page, if someone decides to change the layout or rename a column it can seriously harm this template. I took some precautions in the Power Query layer to adjust column names dynamically etc, but it is not foolproof.

      Try downloading the newer version and let me know if you see something funny.

      • Jake says:

        No worries!
        Was able to fix the vlookup myself but the power query had me bit stumped 🙂 And wanted to give you a heads-up to everyone can enjoy it!

        Thanks for the awesome sheet!

  3. Darren G says:

    Hi,
    Thanks for sharing this world cup tracker. Certainly makes it more interesting when the data is current. As a newbie, it also helps to have a couple of mistakes to find whether unintentional or not.

    Thanks again

  4. Christian says:

    Hi,

    Your v-lookups in the "Group Stage" tab for groups E, F, G, and H (all the ones under column O) are pointing to the wrong country. They all point to column J, so whatever happens to the countries in column J will also be reflected for the countries in the groups in column O for that same row.
    Just thought I'd call that out. Thanks for the great work on this!

    • Chandoo says:

      @Christian... Thanks for trying this and letting me know about lookups. I have fixed the issue now. Please download latest version for that and few more fixes.

  5. Sheeloo says:

    Refresh All did not work correctly. Team names vanished though points were updated.

    • Chandoo says:

      @Sheeloo... Can you please try with latest version (download again using above links). I tested up to latest Iran's stunning win over Morocco and it works.

  6. Gsm says:

    Dear Chandoo

    Thanks a lot for this worksheet.

    However, while refreshing the data, I am getting error message as "Initialisation of Data Source failed".

    • Chandoo says:

      May I know what version of Excel you are using? Do you have internet connectivity? If you are familiar with Power Query, try tracing the steps in the query editor. And oh, first start with the latest version of file (link above).

  7. Andy F says:

    @Etienne - yes. Copy row, paste formats will do it, although obviously that will bring the formats of every cell in the row as well as the height.

  8. Rob Tsintas says:

    Latest version seems to be working well.

    One request: the Groups & Points tables on the Group Stage sheet have the team names pre-entered. This means they don't get sorted according to the results.
    On my copy, I've changed them to a lookup, so they appear in the same order as the points table. It would be good if you can do the same if/when you release a new update!

    Here's what I did. It's not the most elegant, but it works, and I didn't have much time to spend on it!

    Using helper values of 1,2,3,4 in columns I and N for each group, the formula for the first team name in group A (cell J4) is:

    =INDEX(points[Team],MATCH(OFFSET(J4,-(I4),0),points[Group],0)+(I4-1))

    This can be copied & pasted to the other team name cells.

    Cheers!

    • Chandoo says:

      Good suggestion. I have made changes to the points table to remove lookups and just show teams in the order they appear in the detailed table. This way, You will see top two teams on first two rows. We could highlight them as well (figured this would make it look like a bowl of M&Ms, so didn't bother) or highlight *YOUR* team.

  9. Paige says:

    I consider my Excel skills as above average but far from guru and I love how your little projects like this get me to look at data in a new way. I would like to expand on the data in the points table through the use of some calculations but I am a little challenged by the data coming across as text. The Pts column is easy to deal with, but I'm having problems with the GD. The negative goal differential looks like it may be noted with an en dash instead of a minus sign, but if I search for an en dash in the data Excel doesn't find any. I would like to include conversion to a minus sign in my little macro so I can get everything to numbers but so far I am not having any luck. Any thoughts? Thanks for your help.

    • Chandoo says:

      Thanks for such kind words 🙂

      I suggest adding an extra step in Power Query to convert points, GD & other columns to numbers. You can replace em dash in PQ. I did not do it as this will add another layer of dependency and should the wikipedia page change, one more reason for the query to fail.

  10. Petros says:

    As always, an awesome spreadsheet from Chandoo. I love the Power Query score update without macros. The country watch-out is a unique feature as well!

    For those who like a predictor template with flag lookup and a ribbon UI, here is our spreadsheet:

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

  11. Pranav says:

    Great template!

    I came across another one with image vlookups for country flags

    https://eexcel.co.uk/downloads (World_Cup_2018_Sweepstake.xlsx)

  12. Sean says:

    This is a great Template.
    I am running Excel 2010 with the PowerQuery add-in running.
    The scores will not update, so I followed the error and the second operation (Fitlered rows) says that the table is empty.
    After a few minutes on Wikipedia, I realise that my PowerQuery skills are not good enough to work out what the issue is.
    Any suggestions?
    I would like to fix it myself is possible.
    Thanks,
    Sean.

  13. Juan Pablo Diez says:

    Where can I see the results for a specific match?

    Thanks!

    • Chandoo says:

      @Juan... You can now. I have included a results tab that shows match scores. This too is a live table. Just refresh data to get new results. Please download latest version file from links above to use this feature.

      PS: There is another version coming soon with all goals too. I just have to spend some more time polishing the Json to table Power Query thingie.

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