Using Word & Excel v.X to tabulate race results for community festival

[Walt_...@officeformac.com]

Version: v.X Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel Later this month, I will be volunteering for a local sprint racing event at a community festival. Races take place over three days of a long weekend. Friday features one mid-distance race and Saturday and Sunday feature sprint races repeated over the two-day event. (Contestants run in the race for the first day, have their race-time recorded, and then again on the second day, again the time is recorded. The race results are the total of both days' times for each contestant.) Some contestants may drop out of a race or be disqualified.

I was wondering if Excel X could tabulate race times like this. Someone else tried doing it last year with OpenOffice. We may go that route again, but I want to see if we can use Word and Excel in case the other volunteer isn't available.

Central to this project will be the ability to enter data for time (hours, minutes, seconds-plus-decimal-points) and add times together.

There are several different classes of races, each one would presumably be its own spreadsheet. Entries for each contestant would be sorted by starting order, then first and last name, the contestant's hometown and state, then the contestant's assigned racing number, then the times. Contestants are all signed up well in advance of the race, so I now have all of their registration data in hand.

The desired output would naturally be the re-arrange the contestants of each race in order of results. The results would also include for final added time.

Local newspapers and an international racing news web-site are given the results. These entities prefer the results in ".doc" format. I produced last year's results in tables in Microsoft Word v.X:Mac. Below is a link to a PDF file with the 2009 results.

http://sites.google.com/site/waltsimplesite/LobdellRaceResults2-2009.pdf?attredirects=0

How practical would it be to have Excel tabulate the race times and then transfer the data to a DOC file in Microsoft Word? (These news entities do not necessarily use the latest software; some may be long-in-tooth.)

My hardware & software:

MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.33 GHz, 500 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.6.2) iWork 2009, OpenOffice 3, Microsoft Office v.X:Mac

[Bob Greenblatt]

It’s very practical and pretty easy. Times can be easily added and subtracted. See Excel Help and this site:
http://www.cpearson.com/Excel/datetime.htm#AddingTimes

For more information.

--
Bob Greenblatt [MVP], Macintosh
bobgreenblattATmsnDOTcom

[Walt_...@officeformac.com]

How difficult will it be to hide unwanted data from the final results for the news media?

How difficult will it be to take the spreadsheet data from Excel and bring it into Word for the desired tables, like the ones I made last year?

I signed out a Peachpit Visual QuickStart Guide from my local library for Excel 2007 for Windows by Maria Langer. How close will this be to my copy of Excel v.X:Mac? Which sections of the book do you recommend I concentrate on?

This may seem ridiculous, but I haven't had much spreadhseet experience since I used Lotus 1-2-3 for an accounting class 15 years ago.

[John McGhie]

Hi Walt:

I can't see that you got an answer to your follow-up. Nor can I see why
this thread suddenly cam alive again after lying dormant for two months...
But here goes...

1) Impossible. Never send to the news media any data you do not want them
to print. If it is in the file, ASSUME that they WILL read it.

2) Copy and Paste? Not hard at all. And that will get rid of your
unwanted data, PROVIDED that you paste the data as a Word table, and not as
an embedded Excel object. If you paste as embedded Excel, the entire
workbook gets embedded, and they can read all of it :-)

3) Excel 2007 is from a different planet to Excel vX. Take the book back
and get one on Excel 2000, that's a much better fit.

The Excel Help is a much better source of wisdom than most books. Not only
is it about the copy of Excel you are using, but it's right up-to-date.

You want to handle dates and times. To do this, you need to understand that
Excel handles Dates as "The number of DAYS since Jan 2, 1904." Times are
"Decimal fractions of 24 hours".

The following is from the Excel 2008 Help:

Excel supports two date systems: the 1904 system, which is the default for
Excel for the Macintosh, and the 1900 system, which is the default for
Windows versions of Excel. Excel stores and calculates dates as sequential
numbers called serial values, regardless of cell format. Numbers to the left
of the decimal point in the serial number represent the date; numbers to the
right represent the time. Because dates and times are stored as numerical
values, they can be added, subtracted, and included in other calculations.

In the 1904 system, January 2, 1904 is serial number 1, and January 1, 2008
is serial number 37986 (because it comes 37,985 days after January 2, 1904).
In this date system, 12:00 P.M. on January 1, 1905 would be stored as the
serial number 366.5.

You can manually switch between the two date systems in Excel Preferences;
however, the correct date system is selected automatically whenever you open
an Excel document. For example, if you are working in Excel for the
Macintosh and you open a document created in a Windows version of Excel,
Excel calculates the dates by using the 1900 date system automatically.
Dates can become out of sync when you copy them between workbooks that use
different date systems.

Hope this helps

On 13/01/10 9:36 AM, in article 59bb0...@webcrossing.JaKIaxP2ac0,
"Walt_...@officeformac.com" <Walt_...@officeformac.com> wrote:

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word); Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia.
Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410; mailto:jo...@mcghie.name