Monday, March 12, 2018

2018 March Madness Excel Brackets

Spoiler Alert: This post is going to mostly be a re-hash of my same March Madness Excel bracket posts from the past eight years.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! March Madness 2018 is here and the first of the four “play-in” games will begin on Tuesday, March 13th . Once again, I’ll be using David Tyler’s NCAA Excel brackets, the same ones I’ve been using since at least 2010, as they're still the best as far as I’m concerned. I'd like to give a special thanks to David for continuing to update, tweak, and post his excellent brackets each and every March and giving us something to look forward to as we crawl out of the final few weeks of winter (snowing again here in Ohio, I hoped we were done with winter).

I’m a firm believer that a great way to increase your Excel knowledge is to reverse engineer Excel spreadsheet templates, like these office pool March Madness brackets. Previously, I’ve shared 11 things you can learn from the best Excel brackets and they all still apply for this year’s version. David doesn't lock or hide anything behind password protection so you can examine all the formulas to see how they work and make any modifications you desire.

There are two files: the bracket manager and the individual bracket file, that can be downloaded by following the link below. Download the files and start picking them apart!
http://www.whistleblows.com/p/bracket.html

If you’re worried you might not be able to use the March Madness Excel brackets have no fear. They are easy to use and you can watch this short video I made to show you just how easy it is to use David's brackets. Simply click on each team to advance them (don't forget to enable macros).





  • A No. 16 seed has never beaten a No. 1. Like ever.
  • A No. 12 seed usually beats a No. 5 seed.
  • Odds of picking a perfect bracket: 1 in 9.2 quintrillion.
  • Odds of picking a perfect bracket using historical data and basketball knowledge: 1 in 128 billion.

I know some readers of this blog skip over the templates I post, especially if they're sports related. but there really are many lessons that can be learned by examining them that you can apply to your own spreadsheets to improve them. What new lessons about Excel have you learned by breaking down a template?