How To Make Time Slots In Excel
If you love gaming machines, but you aren’t particularly fond of losing your money, you could easily make a slot machine game using Excel to keep you occupied with some gaming fun.
Recently, a viewer asked me how he could create time intervals for every half-hour during the day. It is really easy to do this using AutoFill. Group time by minutes intervals. If you want to group time by minutes intervals, also can use formulas. Select a cell next to the time, and type this formula =FLOOR(A2,TIME(0,15,0)), A2 is the time you use, 15 is the minutes interval, press Enter key and drag fill handle down to apply this formula to cells. Help With An Formula Regarding Time Slots - Excel: View Answers: Hi I have built a workbook that when you enter a start and finish time it write one across the shift. Now I want to take it one step further by adding breaks and lunches. This is how I obtain my start and finish time. Discuss Excel time tracking sheets which although manual and time-consuming, have certain benefits. Automated Time Tracking – The Alternative to Excel Finally, we will show you how to make time far easier, accurate, prevent timesheet fudging and make your team immensely more productive with Time Doctor – an automated time tracking tool. Excel makes it easy to set up a system for tracking time. Follow these steps to create your own or download our sample timesheet template and customize it to fit your needs.
It’s actually easier than you might think. Excel has a number of built in functions that you’ll need to use to make it happen. Open a worksheet in Excel and click on a cell near the center of the screen. The next step is to insert a formula, so find the Formulas menu or ribbon and select the Math and Trig option. Within that menu, select RANDBETWEEN. This will insert a function that creates a random number between any two numbers that you place within the parameters field in the cell. A good range is 1 through 10, so insert those values. From now on, the formula will create a random number between 1 and 10 every time you click on the cell.
Next, you’ll want to copy the formula into the two adjacent cells. This will create a series of three random-number cells that can be highlighted all together in order to reset them all at once. To copy the formula, click on the initial cell so it’s highlighted. Hover your cursor near the bottom right corner of the highlighted cell, and once the cursor changes into a small black cross, you can click and drag across the two adjacent cells. This will copy the formula to those cells.
If you don’t want to have to highlight and click the same three cells every time, you can simply highlight the three cells and drag them all down into the cells beneath them to create a new set of random numbers. This essentially works like a slot machine that saves all the previous spins. If you’re a fan of gaming machines, you’ll probably want to improve the experience by adding a little flare to the display.
First, select the initial cells for your new pattern. Look for the formatting options in the menu or the ribbon section near the top of the app. Select the box that controls the font and select one that appeals to you. Near the font menu should be the font size indicator. Set it to a large font size, something around 72, for more enjoyment. You may have to widen the cells to see the entire numbers, so click on the dividing line in the column labels to widen them as far as they need to go.
You can also choose to use any combination of the Bold, Italic, and Underline options as well if you like. There are also menus to change the background color of the cells and the color of the font. Experiment with the options until you find something you like.
There are tons of other options you can employ in your slot machine. Take away the gridlines so the numbers aren’t inhibited by any other visuals, and decorate the surrounding area with clipart. You can even use the integrated search tools to find specific images you want from the internet. Remember to have fun and play responsibly!
Schedules are given for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 and 26 teams - just click on the number you want. (A schedule is also given for 7 teams playing two games a day.)
You can now download the entire spreadsheet in Excel format.
There is also a version of the spreadsheet by a gentleman called Russell, who sent it to me a few years ago. (Sorry, I lost his email and so only have the name of the spreadsheet to go on!) This has a neat feature that enables you to quickly convert team letters to team names.
How the Spreadsheets Work
Every team is assigned a letter as the team name and every field time slot is assigned a number. All you have to do is substitute the team name for the designated letter and the time and field for the time slot number and, presto, a schedule!
We don't pretend that this is better than some of the software packages out there, but it works and it's free.
Every schedule is designed so that every team plays every other team. With a big division it is probable that the season won't permit this unless games are twice a week. I will make up schedules for other numbers upon request.
Every schedule comes in four versions
Grid 1 is a grid in which each team can see who its opponent is in any given week. Grid 2 shows each team's opponent, week by week. Grid 3 shows the weekly match-ups, with weeks on the x axis and time slots on the y axis. Grid 4 is Grid 3 transposed, with weeks on the y axis and time slots on the x axis.
The four grids yield identical results. Grids 1-3 can be stretched out on the x-axis (Grid 4 on the y-axis) as many extra weeks as the regular reason requires. The extra weeks are simply a repetition of the first n weeks, where n+1 is the number of teams in the division (if there is an even number) or n+2 is the number of teams (if there is an odd number).
I recommend you give coaches schedules based on Grid 3 or 4. Grids 1 and 2 are for scheduler's use to see quickly who is playing whom and in what week.
What about teams playing twice a week?
Easy - just make week 1 the first game of the week, week 2 the second game and so on.
What do I do about odd numbers of teams?
Alternative 1. Take the grid for the number of teams plus one. Allocate one of the team letters to 'Bye'. The team playing the 'Bye' team gets a bye that week.
Alternative 2. Take the team and the two teams immediately following (or preceding) on the schedule and play a round robin of half games (A v B, A v C, B v C). B is the bye team, and has to wait for a half game between halves. But better than sitting out a week!
Examples are given with both byes and round robins of schedules for 7 and 9 teams. We can make up schedules for different numbers on request.
How about an odd number of teams that play two games a day?
It can be done! Suppose you have seven teams. Take the schedule for weeks 1 and 2. Have the two bye teams play each other. Repeat for weeks 3 and 4 and weeks 5 and 6. You may have to make some game time adjustments to avoid teams play too close together. Here is an example.
What times do teams play?
Time Slot Spreadsheet
The schedules do not give game times. That's obviously a matter for each region. What Grids 3 and 4 do is to give match-ups with numbered time slots, which you simply replace with the actual times.
If there is an odd number of teams and you choose to do round robins rather than byes, the time slot needs to be three halves, designated on the third schedule as RR1, RR2 and RR3.
Time Slot Template Schedule Excel
One thing to watch out for is balancing the number of very early morning or late afternoon games. Grids 3 and 4 do this as much as possible by placing teams in varied time slots. This is not so much of a problem if you play on more than one field per division.
Home and Away
Grids 3 and 4 also show home and away teams (home first). So far as possible, Grids 3 and 4 balance the number of home and away games. However, if you only get part way through, the number of home and away games may sometimes get slightly out of balance and this has to be fixed manually.
What about tournaments?
Our spreadsheets are really designed for league play, although with a bit of imagination you can use them for tournaments. You could try a nice set of free spreadsheets for tournament scheduling by Infosports.
Legal Stuff
© 1997-2018 American Youth Soccer Organization Region 76 and Michael Karlin
Permission is given to copy or download the templates and use them for purposes of making up schedules of games. Youth sports organizations - no charge. All others, please send a check for $5 per set of templates or $25 for all of the templates to AYSO Region 76, P.O. Box 1761, Beverly Hills, California 90213. Permission is also given to link to this site but not within a frame or in any other manner which gives any suggestion or impression, however remote, that the templates or this site are the work of anyone other than the copyright holders.
While we have tried very hard to avoid clerical errors (such as teams playing twice in a week or not at all) and especially to ensure consistency between each of the four grids, it is possible that there are some errors and inconsistencies. Please let me know and I will fix them for you and everyone else. I can be reached by e-mail at mkarlin@ayso76.org, by fax at 310-388-5537 or by phone at 310-854-0898.