FIFA Tournament Brackets Template

Today’s guest writer is Barath Balasubramanian —a Design Engineer in the Access test team.

As the excitement about the 2010 world cup in South Africa intensified, I set out to build an application to gather predictions on the results of the tournament from my team mates. Since all of my team mates have access to a SharePoint server, I decided to build the application using Access 2010. In less than two hours I was able to create a cool looking application that can not only track the 2010 FIFA world cup predictions, but can also be customized to fit any tournament format and runs in IE, Firefox and Safari.

The application has simple UI to perform the following tasks:

· A form to make predictions and to create brackets.

· A continuous form to list all predictions.

· A datasheet form to expose the raw data (this can be used to export data to external reporting tools)

Creating the bracket:

Using combo box controls, text box controls and UI Macro actions, I was able to quickly stitch together a simple UI to create tournament brackets. Since the data is driven via tables, it is very easy to re-use this form to track any tournament.

Once you pick the 1^st/2^nd place teams the first column in the bracket tree will automatically be filled out, then you can click the team you think will win in order to fill out the bracket tree.

Once you fill out the tree you simply click save.

Tracking the Brackets:

Once people start filling out the brackets, they can be tracked via this continuous form, which provides a ‘View’ button next to each bracket. A UI Macro action hooked to the ‘View’ button, navigates he page to show details of a specific bracket.

Exporting Data for further processing:

Depending on what tournament is being tracked, one may want to export the data into other systems like Excel charts/Power Pivots and hence a datasheet view of the Raw Data is provided via the UI.

Create your own:

To help jumpstart customization of this template, I added a form with instructions to download and to play around with the application.

Here is a link to the template.

You can either open in via Access 2010 client or directly instantiate the template via Office SharePoint Server 2010. There are multiple other ways to create this template and I would love to hear how you customized this template to suit your needs. Feel free to ping me at Barath.Balasubramanian@microsoft.com