Some basketball fans at Microsoft have released an Excel workbook to play mens and womens ‘fantasy’ college basketball with friends and family.
Excel randomly allocates the 64 teams to your players who can see how the tournament progresses through the shared workbook.
Even if you’re not interested in ‘college hoops’, you can look around the worksheet to see how Excel experts do it.
How to play
Go to these links men’s game, or women’s game which opens the workbook as a read-only file in the browser version of Excel.
Then save to your computer via File | Save As or choose Open in Desktop App from the Viewing menu at right.
Save your copy of the workbook to your OneDrive account. From there you can share it with others.
(note to Microsoft … there’s still no simple way to copy a read-only file from one OneDrive account to another. Users have to save to their local machine and upload again? Disappointingly primitive …)
The setup instructions are on the two green Setup tabs.
Excel Bracket Sheet
On the Bracket tab there’s an impressive breakdown, zoomed out it appears like this.
Not ‘Fantasy’?
We’re curious that Microsoft has avoided the term ‘fantasy’ (as in ‘Fantasy College Basketball). Perhaps that’s a trademarked term?
Which versions of Excel?
Microsoft doesn’t say which Excel’s are supported, obviously it’ll work with:
- Excel in a browser
- Excel 365 for Windows / Mac
- Excel 2021 for Windows/Mac
The workbook uses Xlookup() so the workbook won’t work with earlier Excel’s like Excel 2019/2016. Instead use Excel in a browser.
Xlookup is coming and it’s truly a great thing
New Features in Excel 2021
