Use Excel to track and follow the World Cup

It’s nice to see Excel put to more entertaining uses that boring old spreadsheets and number crunching. That’s exactly what the developers of Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner have done to help you track and follow the event.

Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner is a cleverly designed free spreadsheet created by a group of football enthusiasts that allows you to track the latest scores and standings in the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. It isn’t just a single spreadsheet though, it’s a highly advanced Excel spreadsheet that allows you to input and track results, view current standings, check fixtures and get information about the venues and stadiums.

In fact, it’s so rich in detail that you’ll need to read the quick guide that accompanies it just to work out how to use it. While the look of the interface is naturally limited by the constraints of Excel, navigation is easy using the icons at the top of the page.

The Results section (first picture above) contains a list of all the matches from the group stages through to the final, for you to add the full-time and half-time scores for each as the tournament progresses. You can view current group standings and check the overall progress of the knockout phase. Remember, that everything is calculated based on the results you enter yourself, so if you make a mistake when typing scores in, this will affect the other permutations.

The Predictions area of Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner lets you set up up to four leagues of up to 32 different teams each. Here you and your friends can compete against each other to guess the scores of all the matches, predict who will win the tournament. League tables are kept of each player’s performance.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner is just a spreadsheet. It’s incredibly rich and complex and will appeal to all die-hard football fans with the patience to enter all the data themselves.

How are you tracking the World Cup?