Probably suitable for Level-X, level-4 meets or small inter-club galas etc.
Introduction:
Producing the results for level X events is a PITA. The events are deliberately run in training sessions with many small groups, many sessions and occasionally ad-hoc swims for swimmers who were missing or want another go. This does not work well with normal meet management software like Hytek or Sportsystems which expect to know the swimmers & events in advance to generate heat sheets and then record the results.
So I thought, what we really need is a simple excel sheet where we just enter the swimmers names, events and times and it makes the correct results files to send off to rankings…… several late nights later, here it is:
21/5/2021 – Version 0.6 is the first release for testing. A few others have given it a go (Thank you Mr.E) and I have corrected issues identified, but have not yet submitted results with it. This will happen is a couple of days time.
23/5/2021 – Version 0.7 Added formatted results printing
28/5/2021 – Version 0.8 Corrected a problem in the .mrf files, leading zeros on times were missing.
28/5/2021 – Version 0.9 Corrected a problem in the .mrf file with leading zeros missing on the the events type. This version has been used to successfully submit results for two of our Level-X sessions, but do let me know if you encounter any problems.
Instructions
- Go to the ‘List of swimmers in club’ tab, this needs to be filled in first. Rather than typing them read the instructions on that tab for how to fetch all the data from Swim England and paste it in. Don’t edit the names in the ‘List of Swimmers in the club’ tab because they need to be correct for rankings submission. Once the swimmers have been entered the sheet needs to be kept under control due to GDPR and not shared publicly. If you have a new swimmer, carefully add them to the end of the list with details that match with what you are submitting to Swim England.
- Go to the ‘Events and times’ tab
- Fill in the Event Date, name, venue, session etc.
- Enter the swimmers’ names who are competing in the session.
- The sheet looks the swimmers’ other details and works out their Age. If the swimmer is not found the name box turns red to let you know that something needs fixing. First thing to check is given first name -vs- known as name, you need to use their formal given name as shown in the ‘list of swimmers tab’. Secondly check they are actually in the ‘list of swimmers’ tab.
- Then select an event, the event boxes have little drop down selectors so you can only enter valid events. The sheet has space for 100 swimmers and 10 events per sheet, so if you use one sheet per session that should be enough.
- Enter all the times for that event down the column. Times need to be entered without punctuation and with hundredths e.g. 45.23seconds is entered as 4523 and 1:09.10 in entered as 10910. The sheet does some simple checking of the times and the box turns red if something is wrong.
- Repeat 6&7 for each event
- Fix any problems that are causing red boxes anywhere
- When all the swimmers and times have been entered, hit the ‘Generate Results Files for Rankings’ buttons and it creates the files ready for rankings in the same folder you saved the sheet in. Results will not be generated for swimmers whose names are in red.
- Use the Swimmingresults.org ‘MRF Results Data Validation’ page here to check your results file before submitting.
Things to note
- This sheet contains macros to handle saving the results and name/time validation. Excel will warn you that the sheet contains macros because they are capable of doing “bad things” to your PC if written to do so. I wrote the macros and know they are safe for me. You either have to trust me and click to enable macros or inspect them yourself if you want use the ‘Generate results files’ button and have name and time checking.
- Avoid dragging cells it tends to break things. Copy and paste is generally ok. If you manage to break thinks I suggest opening a new copy of the sheet and Copy and “paste values” the swimmers and results across to the new sheet.
- This probably needs a fairly recent version of excel and has not been tested on Mac versions, so may not work on Macs.
Copyright and support
If you find this is useful to you, please let me know with a comment below and perhaps consider buying me a beer.
If you find a problem, please let me know with a comment and I will try to help if time permits.
(C) May 2021 mark@leman.net / www.leman.net and released under MIT Licence https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
Todo
- Add nicely formatted results printing
- More testing
