Athletics Day

Had a good athletics day today, being the person that I am I seem to be given the IT tasks to be completed. This involves calculating the points and results for the school house competition as well as organising who moves on. Normally this has been done in Microsoft Excel, with its limits on how many can open the document as well as getting information out of it has proved difficult, especially trying to get an up to date house points total.

Bring in Google Sheets, incorporating the existing spreadsheet in was pretty easy, however it turns out that there is over 50 sheets, and I found out that there is a limit on how many cells you can have.

We started development using the schools google docs account, however there seems to be a number of errors uploading, updating and downloading information. So back to a traditional google account, that seemed to work a treat.

We also this year had a live points update happening, as students entered the information that was given to us, the points updated through the use of a IF statement, the points then were updated through a SUM FILTER statement. The result was displayed up on a TV outside where it could be seen, though somewhat difficult with sun and cloud.

The students enjoyed developing the information and getting it in, almost all suggestions where acted upon, including giving a device through to the announer so he could give points update.

The House tutors where happy as they could see what was happening throughout the day.

The only person not happy was the event director, this was due to some of the results not being entered. Though in our defence, the information never reached us. Almost all results that were handed to us were processed with 5-10 minutes. Compared to last year we had so much time on our hands. It was a simple and easy to use solution.

We had a comment made to us, its about the results, not the house points, I agree, why waste time calculating points when results are the most needed. That is why we never touched the points all day. The power of the spreadsheet did all the work for us.

Now thursday, this will be a day of finals and some other events. A easy day we hope?