March Madness Bracket manager guide

Getting Started

Open spreadsheet

Go to the “Goodies” section of the Excel Rain Man website by clicking here. Select “March Madness Bracket Manager(men/women) and click on Download. You will be prompted to fill in the Purchase Details screen. Don’t worry this is FREE.

Once you fill this out, the “March Madness Bracket Manager” will be emailed to you with a link. Once you click on the link, a pop-up window will appear asking you to Open or Save a zip file. We recommend saving the file in a memorable directory on your computer (Desktop or My Documents). Now find the March Madness Bracket Manager.zip and extract the docs from the zipped file (details on how to do this can be found here). You can save the March Madness Bracket files in a directory of your choosing.

March Madness Bracket Forms

You can send out the March Madness Bracket forms to anyone who you wish to include in your March Madness Pool or direct the pool entrants to download just the “March Madness Bracket” (men/women) for free from our goodies page. Ask all participants to enter their Name (23 letters or less) where indicated on the form (Cell B2) and make a selection for each game using the available drop-down menus. Don’t forget to fill in the Preliminary Round Selections if you are including those games in your pool!

March Madness Bracket Manager

Enable Editing & Macros:

When opening the file, make sure you enable the macros and choose a trusted location to avoid the pesky pink “learn more” banner (Having issues doing this? Check out our short video on how to handle it)

Selecting March Madness Game Winners (this comes in handy later):

When the Bracket Manager file is opened, go to the sheet entitled “Winning Bracket” (look at the bottom of the workbook for sheet names). After the winners of each game are determined, select the game winners in each round, using the available drop-down menus. Please do not add/remove rows from this spreadsheet or the Bracket Manager may not calculate results correctly.


 

Using the March Madness Bracket Manager

Once you start receiving completed Bracket Selection forms back from your friends, we recommend saving them in a centralized folder/location. We also recommend that each file be given a unique name (possibly the submitters’ name) so that you can easily identify each bracket form. When you are ready to input the ballot form into the March Madness Pool Scoring sheet, click on the basketball image at the top of the spreadsheet which looks like the following:

When you click the basketball (as long as you have “enabled macros” as noted above), a pop-up should appear. We call this console the March Madness Pool Helper:

The available options (buttons) on the March Madness Pool Helper are as follows:

Input User Forms

Click on this button to add your friends’ bracket selections to the March Madness Bracket Manager. Remember, the March Madness Bracket files will need to be saved before they can be uploaded to the Bracket Manager. To upload a ballot form, simply:

  1. Click the “Input User Forms” button – A file dialog box will appear, allowing you to find and upload the ballot forms on your computer
  2. Select the ballot form(s) that you wish to upload by either double-clicking on the file(s); or highlightingthe file(s) and clicking “Open”.
  3. Doing this will automatically add a new sheet(s)/tab(s) to the March Madness Bracket Manager workbook, containing the person’s bracket selections.
    Please Note: If you have already uploaded a person’s bracket form (according to the name listed in the bracket form in cell B2, which must be 23 letters or less), another pop-up will appear asking if you want to overwrite the existing data in the Bracket Selection sheet. (You would use this option if someone changed their answers and resubmitted their sheet to you). Select “Yes” to overwrite or “No” to keep the existing data for the person listed.

Correlate Results

This button will update the March Madness Pool Scoring sheet to display all selections from the uploaded bracket forms. It will also calculate your March Madness Pool Champion!

  • Once you have uploaded all of the March Madness Bracket forms (using the “Input User Forms” button), clicking the “Correlate Results” button will pull the selections from the uploaded bracket forms and display them in rows to right of the “Winners” Column.
  • As the March Madness game winners are announced and you enter them into the “Winners” Bracket sheet (see “Selecting March Madness Game Winners” above), click the “Correlate Results” button to calculate a point total for each participant. You can run this option as many times as you’d like to update the point totals throughout the tournament (i.e. you can calculate and re-calculate the point totals after each round as the game winners are announced!).

Exit

This allows you to view the list without the March Madness Pool Helper. You can always bring the Helper back by clicking on the basketball at the top of the sheet.

 


Scoring Methodology

Feel free to change/tailor the Point System to your liking. You can do by this by changing the applicable points for each round on the March Madness Pool Scoring sheet (column C) within the March Madness Bracket Manager workbook.

 

Notes: It is recommended that all changes to the March Madness Pool Scoring sheet (except for selecting the point totals for each round), be done using the March Madness Pool Helper; otherwise the results may not be as expected.
It is recommended that you save this spreadsheet before closing or your work will be lost.

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