Please save me from "Excel Hell"

December 24, 2007 3:00 PM

I need suggestions for an application (or database) to help my employer keep better track of live-trivia scorekeeping results. They are currently doing it all in various separate Excel spreadsheets, and this is (almost) 2008, so I'm sure there must be a better way.

One of the side-jobs I have is scorekeeping live-trivia games in local bars. The company I work for hosts about 10 games per week in/around the local city. Apparently before I came along, all nightly scores (for each game) were kept by hand on large sheets of drafting/spreadsheet paper and then handed in to the main office where all the scores were hand-input into Excel spreadsheets to keep track of season-long league scores.

I refuse to do things the hard way (by hand) when there are easier options. So I created a color-coded spreadsheet with macros to auto-add everything for me. All I have to do is type in team names and points and the sheet adds up everything for me. At the end of the night I email it to the main office. So thats an improvement, but .....


A couple days ago I was asked to help at the main office... inputting the nightly scores into the league sheets for each trivia location, and cross-referencing everything to make sure its right. It took several hours. To say that system is frustrating would be an understatement. There *MUST* be a better (and easier) way.


***Goals***
1.) Trivia-teams should be able to simply hit a website and see their scores and league standing.
2.) Trivia-scorekeepers should have an easy way to keep nightly scores AND an easy way to submit those scores to central office.
3.) Central office should have an easy way to compile all the scores and keep everyone happy :P


***Possible solutions***

1.) improve the existing Excel spreadsheet solution to be more organized and macros to auto-add scores (nightly AND league-wide)......This is probably what I'll do in the short term.

2.) Find some database solution that can be run at the office (access, filemaker, ????).. that we could input all the scores into and then run reports on to print out up-to-date league scores for each trivia-location.

3.) Some sort of online, web-2.0 collaborative solution (possibly even integrated into the companies website) (password protected of course) This solution could be "off-the-shelf" existing web2.0 software, or something developed ?


***Problems***

1.) Not all trivia locations have internet/wireless access
2.) Not all trivia scorekeepers have laptops
3.) Not all trivia scorekeepers really "care"---so getting them transcribe handwritten scores into an internet form after the show, is going to be next to impossible (these ARE college kids we're talking about after all :P... they'd rather be out drinking)


I think I probably have enough tech skills to pull off solution #3 above (for the most part), given that I can find some good/easy to use database software. In a perfect world, Trivia-Players and scorekeepers would just go to something like--> http://triviacompanieswebsite.com/trivia and see scores (or submit scores) so that the central office didnt have to do anything.

I dont really get paid a whole lot for this (writing questions and scorekeeping).. but I'd really like to impress my boss by coming up with a vast improvement to this part of his business.

posted by jmnugent to computers & internet (3 comments total)

FileMaker Pro can do web stuffs and it's easy as pie to import existing Excel DBs into it. Also it's very pliable and can be made to do whatever the heck you want it to do.
posted by crustix at 3:16 PM on December 24, 2007

How do the participants enter their answers to questions? How are the scores tallied in real time? I hosted trivia games on AOL for seven years and we had a scoring program that we used that not only tallied the scores during a game but also kept overall statistics. Don't know if it would work with what you're doing, or maybe you could tweak it to suit your needs....?
posted by Oriole Adams at 3:16 PM on December 24, 2007

Oriole Adams:

Its "live-trivia".. so we are asking the questions via microphone, and participants/teams write their answer down on a small note of paper and walk it up to us. I take the answers handed to me by teams----check to see if they are correct or not. and then record points on my laptop/spreadsheet. As the evening progresses, we award prizes to the winner of each round (3 rounds total) and bigger prizes for 1st/2nd/3rd at the end of the entire night. When the night is over.. I email the scoresheet for that night to the central office.
posted by jmnugent at 3:28 PM on December 24, 2007