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August 05, 2002
Pigskin, Perchance?
Usually, you can tell when I'm in the office and when I'm not by the level of activity on the blog. For the past few weeks, I've been pretty busy on a client. Why, then, was my activity still low last week, even though I had come off the regular team on the client? Well, for that you can blame fantasy football.
I was fine with not thinking about football up until last Wednesday, when a colleague showed me his super nifty cool Excel spreadsheet with VBA that he was going to use for the draft. (Further, he was going to finish it off a little more and consider selling it. It's that good.) Anyway, having seen him with a cool tool, I had to have one of my own.
Last year, I used a moderately complex and surely not user friendly method of tracking the fantasy draft. I had all of the draft slots set up and ready to go and had a giant list of players that I used as a validation list when people drafted players. Needless to say, this took some fair amount of scrolling and it sucked in the early rounds when all the choices were really easy and people were blowing through their picks.
I aspired to more this year. That included trying to set up a spreadsheet closer approximating my colleague's. I don't know VBA, so there was no really good way for me to get up to speed on that, but I know Excel and I'd be damned if I couldn't try to simulate as much of the spreadsheet as I could.
So I spent the week hacking at Excel.
The result was pretty nice. I have an interface where I have a table with all of the draft slots, waiting to be populated. I have supporting sheets with players, ordered by value-based massaging. I have another table that shows me the roster, on the fly, depending on a variable, the owner of a team. Enter another team owner and the roster rearranges itself to show the new owner's roster. Likewise, it will show the distribution of positions (quickly eyeball how many RB's you have compared to WR's) and bye weeks (check to see if you're going to be overly weak in Week 8).
I'm pretty happy with it so far. My next big hurdle is trying to find a way to make it easy to populate the draft table, while eliminating the players already selected and keeping the lists compact. This, I think, might require me to learn some VBA. I have until next Wednesday to accomplish it.
Welcome back to the obsession.
Posted by KinCross at August 5, 2002 08:07 PM