As the gentleman at immigration counter stamped my passport & said, “Welcome to Australia”, I could barely contain my excitement. You see, Australia has been on my list of places to visit as far back as I can remember. It finally happened on On Sunday, 29th of April 2012.
After collecting my baggage, I walked out of Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport. My friend Danielle (from Plum Solutions) is waiting for me there. Thus began my Australian adventure and it was fantastic. (Aussies so fondly use this word).
Grab a fine cup of coffee, sit back and read to know how the whole experience went.
Back story: How the opportunity came
I am not sure how the fascination with Australia began. But as I grew up the desire to visit land down under grew up too. So much that during my MBA placement season, I even applied for Macquarie Bank to work as an analyst in Sydney. Despite not knowing how to balance a balance sheet. It was a good thing they did not hire me, or else I would have been blamed for the global financial mess.
When I quit my job to work on Chandoo.org full time, I pushed the Australian trip further in to future, as I wanted to focus on running business.
Almost one year ago, on 30th June, a brilliant idea crossed my mind, “why not conduct a set of classes in Australia. That would give me an excuse to visit the place while not paying for the trip out of my pocket.”
Danielle’s name immediate came to my mind. So I emailed her “Excel workshops in Australia …?” and we got talking.
In March this year I have applied for Australian Visa & announced about the session on Chandoo.org. We got tremendous response for the session with many early sing-ups.
Initially I have planned to travel with Jo & kids. But after discussing about it, we realized that it may not be a good idea to travel with kids given that I would have to visit a new city every week to conduct the trainings. So I left for Australia alone with mixed feelings. Sad to leave kids & Jo behind, excited to visit it finally.
Response for our Excel & Dashboards Masterclasses
We conducted 4 Masterclasses – 1 each in Sydney & Brisbane and 2 in Melbourne. A total of 64 people attended the sessions. We also conducted 3 masterclasses for KPMG for their offices in Sydney, Perth & Melbourne. Around 30 people from financial modeling, risk management, auditing teams of KPMG attended these. And we did a 1 day training program (shorter version of masterclass) for SEEK.COM.AU in their Melbourne office.
I received very positive & happy feedback from delegates everywhere. This shows the generosity of Aussies. I felt fortunate to have eager, enthusiastic & excellent participants for all the classes. Few testimonials from the attendees,
Chandoo’s personality makes learning advanced excel techniques actually _fun_. I think that says a lot. You don’t often say to yourself “Wow, I had fun playing with Excel today!”, do you?
– Tom Hubbard, Manufacturing (Sydney)
Great useful content focused on real world examples. Emphasis on planning aswell as actual excel examples which means content can be applied to any dashboards e.g. BI or other software.
… very knowledgeable both about excel and business scenarios. Clear simple instructions with excellent knowledge across all versions of excel.
– Sinead Starrs, Marketing (Sydney)
chandoo is like a ‘drug’, that keep you want to get even more for excel 🙂 no wonder why he’s a CEO for this. I think from professional point of view .. Chandoo is helping us to get into the skill sets where the reporting level should be more straight forward, lively, and help the decision maker to make a good decision. I strongly recommend this training for any excel savvy just to enhance knowledge and found a ‘new love’ to excel.
– Chandra Jong, Financial Services (Sydney)
Chandoo was fantastic. He was very easy to understand and made everyone feel comfortable to any raise questions. Chandoo’s knowledge about Excel is unbelievable – I wish I had his brain! I would recommend this course to everyone who works with Excel to prepare data/reports. Excel is forever changing and unless you keep up to date it’s hard to know about new techniques. Chandoo also gave some useful tips on keeping our Excel knowledge up to date. I was never a big fan of Excel but after this course I absolutely love it!! It’s amazing what we can use Excel for.
– Anonymous, Mining (Brisbane)
Presenter very knowledgeable and ran through alot of topics. I have been on other excel courses, and they always teach to the lowest common denominator. This was very fast paced, so I was never bored.
– Anonymous, Telecommunications (Brisbane)
Business-oriented. In our country, there are many PC schools, but the instructor has little business backgrounds and presentation skill.
– Anonymous, Teaching (Melbourne) – Flew from Japan to attend this.
Just wanted to say thank you for the fantastic course you conducted at KPMG in Melbourne. Some of the ideas you presented were fantastic and I will definitely incorporate them into client work in the future.
The course exceeded my expectations. The method and format you presented the course in was absolutely brilliant. I especially loved the help function you created by using a SHOW/HIDE macro on text-boxes and bubble-boxes. So simple but so powerful! I hope we can get you back out here again and teach us some more cool tricks and ideas that will impress our clients!
– Adam, Consulting (Melbourne)
I have managed to collect few video testimonials too. I will share them some other time.
I was a little worried before starting my first class, mainly because,
- I never charged $1000 per class, so I am not sure if the participants would be happy with what they get.
- Most of them had very high expectations as they have been reading Chandoo.org for a while and wanted to learn even more.
But I felt happy knowing that majority liked the course and immensely benefited from it.
What I learned by conducting the classes
Many things. Training 100 people from different industries, experience levels & skills in a short span of 6 weeks proved to be both a challenge & an excellent opportunity. The best things I learned are,
- Slow down during my explanations: Because we had a steep task of designing powerful dashboards in 2 days, I had to rush thru some concepts like INDEX+MATCH combination, SUMIFS, Conditional formats etc. While this worked well for many, there are a few people in each class who felt lost. I modified my style and pace for each session to make sure delegates get the best out of it. Next time when we plan a public training, I will make sure we cover fewer topics so that everyone can enjoy it.
- Most of my explanations work alright: Since I do very few live classes every year, this trip gave me confidence as almost every one told me they liked the explanations & examples.
- Add some printable material to the course: Quite a few people asked for print outs to take back home. I will be including several documents & detailed tutorials in my next courses so that delegates can carry the instructions back.
I have also learned various simple things & tips during this trip. I will be implementing them to make my future training programs even more awesome.
About Australia
Now what do I say. It certainly was worth the wait.
In Sydney, I loved the long walks on harbor bridge, excellent food & coffee near rocks, flowers & greenery in Royal botanical gardens, the magic of opera house, the bustling shops & arcades at Pitt & Hay streets. I loved the warm, smiling people. Everyone I met welcomed me to Sydney.
In Perth, I loved meeting Hui after all the time, loved their family (Eva, Lovely, Jhuvy & Leonard), enjoyed the majestic views from kings park, liked running next to Swan river, savored delicious fish & chips at Fremantle beach cafes. Perth was sunny & blue all the while I was there.
In Brisbane, I loved meeting Kurt (from Plum Solutions), enjoyed excellent food & coffee, Sprawling views from Roma street gardens, bustling shopping malls in down town, walking besides Brisbane river. It was a pity that I stayed only 2 days in Brisbane.
In Melbourne, I loved the vibrant culture, the criss-crossing trams, amazing national gallery of Victoria, walking on Bourke & Swanston streets amidst a sea of humanity, having coffee at Federation square. I spent a whole day exploring MCG, Rod Laver arena. I learned the rules of Australian Rules Football. Even though it rained, remained cold, Melbourne felt like a lovely place all along.
I felt bad not bringing Jo & kids to enjoy all this. But I know for sure that I will be in Australia next year. And we will fly together.
Thank you
I could not have done any of this on my own. Many thanks to,
- Danielle for planning these masterclasses & relentlessly pushing it so that I could fly there.
- Kurt & Susan from Plum Solutions who helped me conduct the classes
- Hui & family for showing me good time while I am in Perth
- KPMG & SEEK for having me at their offices so that I could share some of my knowledge with their teams.
- All the 64 (+1 who paid, but missed) delegates who attended my Masterclass and took time to learn. You are fabulous.
- Special thanks to people who flew in from different places to attend – from Hobart, from Adelaide, from Canberra, from Tokyo – Your eagerness to learn makes you awesome.
- Hugs & lots of love to all the people who spared an evening to have drinks with me in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne.
- Special thanks to Crystal, who bought me lovely breakfast in Sydney.
- Thanks also to Saxons training institute for taking care of all the arrangements for our public classes.
- Ravindra, Sameer & Vijay for holding the fort at Chandoo.org while I am away
- Last but not least – thanks to you. Because you take time to read Chandoo.org, I find the confidence & support to dream something like this and achieve. Thank you.
Few Pics
Here are some pics from the last 6 weeks.
Have a good weekend.
28 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup 2018 Excel Tracker – FREE Download”
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
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.
Button alignment is one for the ultra-OCD sufferers 😉 There are ways, but only for those with too much time on their hands.
Aah, Excel. The perfect tool for people like us. Everything (cells) is in same shape and size by default and aligned perfectly. 😀
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 🙂
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
@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.
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!
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
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!
@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.
Refresh All did not work correctly. Team names vanished though points were updated.
@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.
Dear Chandoo
Thanks a lot for this worksheet.
However, while refreshing the data, I am getting error message as "Initialisation of Data Source failed".
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).
@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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Here is our World Cup 2022 template with LAMBDA functions:
https://www.spreadsheet1.com/fifa-world-cup-2022-qatar-free-prediction-templates-for-excel.html
[…] Interesting World Cup Tracker here at chandoo.org : https://chandoo.org/wp/fifa-worldcup-2018-tracker/ […]
Great template!
I came across another one with image vlookups for country flags
https://eexcel.co.uk/downloads (World_Cup_2018_Sweepstake.xlsx)
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.
@Sean... Can you try the latest version mate? I think it should work.
Where can I see the results for a specific match?
Thanks!
@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.