Excel Game – Do You Know the Offside Rule?!
Excel Game – Do You Know the Offside Rule?!
INTRODUCTION
How can you get better at Excel? Creating an Excel game is a great way to explore Excel’s capabilities away from the pressures of work or study. We hope that our Excel game inspires you to try to create your own! The game works for PC (but not Mac); it will not work in Google docs or Open Office. If you have Excel, Simply save the file to your desktop, open it, and get started!
Click here to download the file.
Click here to download the file.
WHAT IS THE GAME?
Our Excel game is called Euro 2016 Linesman. A linesman’s role in football or ‘soccer’ is to indicate if a player is offside. Simply put, a player is ‘offside’ if there are fewer than two players between him or her and the goal, when the ball is played.
In our game, you have to make a number of offside decisions from a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the pitch. Decisions are assessed in terms of accuracy and time. If your decision-making is good enough, the assessor will promote you to a higher league. The aim is to reach the Euro 2016 tournament at the end of the season, but you only have 11 months – and you can be demoted as well as promoted! There is at least one surprise along the way…
Why not download it and try it out? Simply save the file to your desktop, open it, and get started! Will your friends be able to beat your scores?
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The Excel game file is not protected, and you can explore it to understand how it works. Simply right-click on the sheet tab at the bottom to unhide the hidden sheet.
The Excel game combines together formulae and Excel VBA code to create the required functionality. The shapes are randomly positioned within certain parameters using random numbers. Using VBA, a table on the background sheet is populated with the positions of each of the ‘players’; formulae then compare the positions, and establish if players are offside or not.
The file uses formulae and VBA to note the time that decision-making starts, and ends. This gives a time for each decision. Right and wrong decisions are tracked from one routine to the next using module-level variables. User interaction takes place through dialogue boxes – simple message boxes, and ‘yes / no’ message boxes. All of these elements combine together to create the gameplay.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Exploring an Excel game is a great way to improve your Excel skills away from the pressures of work or study. This kind of creative application pushes our imagination and skill level, which can only benefit our day-to-day work. The Excel game is also a great example of a complete Excel application: more important than understanding the formulae and VBA code is to understand how the whole thing works. When you learn to combine different elements (formulae, code, user interface, backend) together, you can create powerful Excel applications.
We hope you enjoyed the Excel game! Do you have a specific question about how it works? Why not leave a comment on the video on the YouTube channel, and share the file with your colleagues.
Ever thought about getting started with computer coding in Excel?