[KevinTMC]

This thread has been really helpful in getting me started on schedule generation...many thanks to thehip41. I'm still fussing with trying to rearrange home vs. away so teams have as sensible a homestand/roadtrip pattern as possible; that seems to be the hardest part of the whole thing.

I've been trying to automate a lot of the tracking and double-checking, and after playing around with formulas--and relearning about array formulas in particular--I've come up with some features that might be helpful to others, so I'll share them here.

The attached file is a single sheet, with my in-progress schedule project on the left, laid out like the Schedule tab in thehip41's example. Next to it on the right are two trackers. On top is the same Home/Away view as in the example's HA tab, except that I have it automatically pulling home-team information, so I don't have to enter it manually (and keep changing it manually as I tinker with the schedule, which was one part that was proving a real hassle).

Below that is an automatic tally of how many series each team has scheduled against each other team, both home and away (the x-axis represents the home team). This should eliminate the need for manually crossing matchups off the matchup sheet from Part 2 above; I think it makes it possible to skip making that sheet at all.

The trackers are set up to show correct totals as green numbers and incorrect/incomplete ones as red ones. (The correct numbers are set in the conditional formatting; adjustments can be made there to the target numbers to accommodate different numbers of teams or schedule lengths or formats.) Also, boxes in the HA tracker will change color if a team is trying to host more than one series at the same time. I suppose an additional check could be added to look for cases where a team was scheduled for simultaneous home and away series; I would think that most of those would be caught by the series tracker below though.

Note that the trackers here are keyed to the first game of each three-game set only. That's working out fine for me in this example, because the schedule is being set up for three-game series only, all starting on either Monday or Friday. There is even simple interleague play included in this example, but no divisional play (the league is just 12 teams, split between two single-division subleagues). If you've got a more complicated setup, this may or may not be easily adaptable for you; but the formulas may at least help give you some ideas.

Oh, and if you've not worked with array formulas before...they're the ones in the curly brackets: { }. You don't type those characters when entering the formula though; what you do is type CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER instead of just ENTER and it will make it an array.

I'll be happy to answer any questions about what I've tried to do here.

P.S. I had to change the file extension to .xls to get it to upload, but you'll need Excel 2007 or later (or something else that's able to handle the .xlsx feature set) for it to work properly.