On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000!
The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll.
It took us 8 years & 15 days since the very first comment to get here. And it took just 1 year 7 months & 23 days to add the last 10,000 comments (we had our 10,000th comment on 21st November, 2010).
Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand more about these 20,000 comments. So I downloaded our comment database, dumped it in Excel and start analyzing.
Understanding the comment growth
Although Chandoo.org has been around since 2004 July, we grew particularly chatty since 2009, when the site started becoming popular. If you look the time from first comment to now & plot total comments by date, this is how it looks. Each 1000 is highlighted (and 5,000s are marked in green).
While it took us more than 5 years to get to 5,000 comment mark, the next 5k came in less than an year. Now a days, we are adding 114 comments every week.
Here is another chart, showing how many days it took us to get each successive thousand comments.
Which months & days of week are popular?
Lets look at monthly trends of comments since 2008.
As you can see, All the months have seen growth since 2008 (and yoy for most months).
And when it comes to weekdays, Thursdays & Fridays are most popular with Chandoo.org commenters.
Who comments on Chandoo.org?
Between Hui & me, we have left 2,650 odd comments on Chandoo.org. The top 10 commenters have left a whopping total of 3,695 comments to date.
Lets look at how many comments are left by first time commenters vs. existing commenters.
Existing commenter is someone who has left a comment earlier with same email id.
As you can see, During first 10,000 comments, existing commenters used to rule. Now a days, about 40% comments are from new commenters.
Do newsletter subscribers comment?
We have more than 36,00 odd people tuned in to our newsletter. I wanted to know how many of them leave comments.
About 45% of comments are from Newsletter commenters. About 5% of our newsletter subscribers (2,055 people) actually comment. The rest are happy to read the newsletter and learn.
That means, on average, each newsletter subscriber adds 5 comments (where as non-subscribers add only 2 comments)
How much % of comments are from Top 10 commenters?
In the early days (for first few thousand comments), Top 10 commenters used to contribute 50% of comments. Now a days, their contribution is at 20%. This is because of the huge number of commenters we are adding every month. As our community grew, we have lots of people who are helping each other.
Top 10 commenters – then & now
Here is how top 10 commenters fared since first 5000 comments. You can see how Hui raised to Top 2 from nowhere & how we lost some of the frequent commenters over time.
Where do the comments go?
In early days, comments are always on the latest articles. So if a post is one month old, it is quiet. But now a days, we are adding more comments on older posts than on new ones. Thanks to Google, people are discovering older content more and asking questions (or thanking us) there.
Which posts attract most comments
Next, lets see which posts are most chatty. But looking at # of comments alone is not enough. So I added % of page views (out of total page views on Chandoo.org between a sample period of APR-JUN 2012) and yearly break-up of comments received since 2008. As you can see, some posts are like blips, they get lots of comments and then become quiet. These are often polls, one time messages (like congratulations, happy new year etc.). The other posts consistently attract a lot of comments because they are visited by hundreds of people every week.
PS: You can click on link to see the actual post.
What do the commenters say?
I have an in house metric to see what the commenters say. It is called as Awesomeness Quotient. It is very simple to measure. I check the comment text to see if any of these words are in it.
Love, awesome, wow, !!, great, incredible, super, fantastic, blowing, perfect, excellent
If so, I give the comment 1 point. Else 0 points.
Then, I add up all these points to see how many points we have over the total number of comments.
As you can see, we have been hovering around 45% awesomeness quotient since inception.
PS: If I had a $ every time, someone said cool, I would have 335 cool ones.
Most frequent words in the comments
The most frequent word in our comments is Excel, used 4,650 times. The next frequent word is thank used 4,554 times. I guess that sums up what commenters say nicely.
Here is a list of 64 59 most frequent words (arranged by frequency and alphabetical order).
Note: Each sparkline has its own axis maximum. You cannot compare frequency of one word with another by looking at their heights.
Note 2: If you want this info with same axis maximum for all, click here.
Comments vs. Posts
Here are 2 tag clouds, one for the content in posts & the other for comments. Can you guess which is which?
[click here for larger version]
The left one is for comments.
Interesting Trivia
- 51% of comments are made with in one week after an article is published.
- We add 4% more in 2nd week, 4% more in next 2 weeks. That is, only 59% of comments are made with in one month of writing an article.
- We get 70% comments between 8AM-8PM (GMT). The busiest hours for commenting are 1PM & 5PM GMT
- Since 1st Jan 2010,
- We had 7 quiet days (days with 0 comments).
- And on 4 days, we received 100 or more comments
- We got 17 comments on Christmas & New year days
- The longest comment was 11,274 characters long by Ronald on 2nd June, 2010.
- There are 5 comments with more than 5,000 characters long.
- For every legitimate comment, we get 20 spam comments. So since Jan 2008, our spam filters have blocked 417,104 spam comments.
How these charts are made?
At least 5 cups of coffee, 2 hours of thinking, several hours of SQL, VBA, Pivot & SUMIFS, an hour of formatting & conditional formatting and may be 10 minutes on Wordle.net.
I am unable to share the actual Excel file with you as there is lots of sensitive data (email addresses, IPs etc.) and the file is too heavy – 30 MB at last count.
Do you comment on Chandoo.org?
If you have never left a comment, now is your time. Go ahead and lose your comment virginity. It feels awesome to share your thoughts with rest of us.
And if you are a commenter, well, you have my love & good thoughts. Go ahead and say something more. You know I am all ears to hear what you say.
Go ahead and leave a comment. Next stop, 30k.
Thank you
Thank you so much for taking time to learn from Chandoo.org. Special thanks to 7,278 of you who left a comment on Chandoo.org ever.
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.