Transcript
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Announcer:
Welcome to The Podcast To Be Named Later, where we explore the world a conversation at a time. Sit back and enjoy. Here are your hosts, Chris and Kelly.

Kelly:
Hello everyone this is an abbreviated version of the podcast to be named later. I'm flying solo today is I'm doing a short demonstration of a fantasy football tracker. That can be used with a screen reader. If you are taking part in a fantasy football draft. I'll be meeting Chris later this week for our own families Football fantasy draft, and this is a tool I've used for a few years. I just wanted to kind of show how this works. So I'll share this online. And it's a basic spreadsheet that I've created, so I've opened it up already.
Kelly:
So we are on the instruction sheet of the draft and it has a few details of things you need to do. Most notably. We're going to use control. We are going to use control page down to go to the teams tab. My particular Fantasy Football League uses. 18. Oops. And you'd want to change these names if you want to the individuals in your draft. However you want to name them. In addition, on this same sheet, if we move to the right.
Kelly:
A few more items to take note of that you can change. So this is just a table of information item and value.
Kelly:
In this case, the roster size our fantasy football draft uses 18 players. You can change this to whatever number you want. We use what is known in fantasy football as an auction value draft. The spreadsheet is set up for that kind of a draft. Typically those have a set amount of money that you can spend to populate your team. Standard is 200 and that's what we use.
Kelly:
here again.
Kelly:
Just change this. To whatever value you want, but you don't actually have to edit this value up. You'll notice it said it had formula, so it will just look at the number of teams at the left edge of this spreadsheet and use that.
Kelly:
So that's the basic instructions for configuring. Now I'm going to switch to the players sheet.
Kelly:
So I have downloaded some player data. Again, there are much better sources of rankings and things like that. The point of this spreadsheet wasn't to be the end all be all of rankings. It's just to get the player names. So I've got a few columns here that we'll talk about. So first is the player name and you'll hear the name. And these do have hyperlinks because of the place where I. Copied the data that kind of goes to profiles of the players.
Kelly:
Position, as you can imagine, is what position does the player play.
Kelly:
Rank again from the source I downloaded this was their ranking. The team. This is the first area that you care about and what you'd want to do during the draft. Is as a player is taken. You can press alt down arrow here.
Kelly:
And put the team who drafted the player.
Kelly:
So we'll put team four for Christian McCaffrey. And then the price or the amount that someone paid? So in this case, we'll put 45. And.
Kelly:
You'll notice that in this spreadsheet with JAWS, I've set it up using a feature in Excel called First column that automatically makes the first column kind of like a row header, and then I set auto filtering on the top column and that also makes those. Row headers. If you wanted to add your own rankings to make notes or whatever, you could in in this space in the table. Now let's just say the next player will move down. Is CD lamb for the Dallas Cowboys. I know it's the Dallas Cowboys. If you wanted to check, you could read back down the row. And we're going to assign that because you know the next kind of auction bidding has happened. So we'll assign that to team seven and here again, if you change those names, it would say like in my case Kelly or whatever other people are in your league. And we will put 45 there as well.
Kelly:
And now we've automatically moved down to Tyreek Hill.
Kelly:
And we'll just assign this one also to team four for demonstration purposes. You can type the names as well, although in the spreadsheet there are not database validation rules enforced. To make sure that you only type existing names just because during a draft sometimes speed is more important than accuracy. If you want to go fix things later or something like that. So I strongly recommend. Using Alt down arrow and picking from the list.
Kelly:
If you try this and here we'll put 35. And we could keep doing this, but I want to show kind of the essence of this so. Typically in this kind of a draft, there was some kind of a draft board, a visual. Draft board.
Kelly:
Now this uses pivot tables from this point and in Excel the shortcut key to refresh a pivot table is control alt F5. So we're going to go ahead and refresh this auction tracker table.
Kelly:
So now I'm arrowing through the pivot table and let's note what's happened. So here the first team, because not every team shows up here until they have taken players. So team four has spent $80.00 of their 200, that's two players and 45 and 35 is 80. So now we hear the number of players taken and that's two. The team 4 still needs 16 players.
Kelly:
And this is the other important thing. If you're tracking a draft for yourself or others. The whole key here is given you need 16 players and how much money you have left and everything else. There's a concept in fantasy football of your Max bid. So in order to make sure that you have at least $1.00 left for every player, this would be the maximum amount that you can spend on anyone player. So if you were to spend 100 and. $5, you'd still need 15 players and so this would then show your Max bid was $1.00. 
Kelly:
They spent $45.00 one player and we could go through this row.
Kelly:
Now the other names don't show up yet because the pivot table hasn't populated them. There are a few other tabs here that can be helpful. So position tracker. Again, each time you go to a sheet, you're going to want to press control alt F5. So the position tracker will show you how many players of a certain type. You have each team has taken different leagues have different rules, so you'll have to keep track of that manually have someones exceeding, but this at least gives you an idea. So let's look at. So here's the first rows blank. These are the untaken player. My data had 400 players total.
Kelly:
But so here is team four. So in quarterbacks, team four is taking none.
Kelly:
One wide receiver, if you recall and one running back because team four had drafted Christian McCaffrey from the running backs and Tyreek Hill from the wide receivers.
Kelly:
Now. You have a couple of ways to track what's been taken. You can go back to the player sheet and see what's going on, but the other thing again new pivot table. So we're going to hit control Alt F5. And now in this case I've set the pivot table up so that the leftmost column are the player names.
Kelly:
And now if you go across.
Kelly:
So team 4. Now you're like, hey, I don't want to arrow down every every row. But what you can do in Excel if you want to study what players each team has taken is when you're in a row, hit control down arrow.
Kelly:
And you'll hear one this is a function of how pivot tables work in Excel using some things, but you can see the first player for team four is Christian McCaffrey. And then Tyree kill again, another control down arrow.
Kelly:
And then the total is 2. If we arrow to the right.
Kelly:
Team 7, where we had drafted one player.
Kelly:
And that player was CD Lam. I hit control up arrow in this case. And then Team 7. So I use this and now Everson not going to be checking all of this all the time. But sometimes when you're taking a pause or people want to, you know, take a break or you want to check yourself. Again, the heart of this is the.
Kelly:
Position or the player the players. So we'll go put one more bid in for Team 4.
Kelly:
And we're going to also assign this one to Team 4.
Kelly:
And if we remember, we were told the Max bid for team four was 105. So we're going to put 105 just for demonstration.
Kelly:
And I hit enter and as excel you likely know when you hit enter it moves down to the next cell. So we. Heard the next player.
Kelly:
Again.
Kelly:
We want to make sure we hit control alt F5. So here's team four amount spent, 185.
Kelly:
And maximum bid left is $1.00, so Team 4 is not going to have a very exciting time in the auction for the rest of the draft.
Kelly:
Unlike previous years, I did not sort this player data by position, but you can use again the auto filter feature of Excel on the top row.
Kelly:
So right now select all this, check if we uncheck that.
Kelly:
And we want to see just a certain position, we could check running back.
Kelly:
Hit enter. And now you would be studying just the running backs. As the draft fills up as a reminder, you can also use control up and down arrow to jump to only blank cells, say in the owner column.
Kelly:
If there were more items filled here, it could be a quick way to see which players are.
Kelly:
Unavailable or have been taken. So there's a lot going on here, but hopefully this helps give a little bit of a tutorial as to how you can use this spreadsheet to have an enjoyable fantasy football draft. If you use it, or if you just play fantasy football in in general, good luck and I hope you win your league. And thank you everyone for listening to this abbreviated episode of the podcast to be named later.