New to Numbers - Race Timing Sheets?

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Level 2

236 points

New to Numbers - Race Timing Sheets?

I've never used Numbers before, and have only very minor experience with spreadsheets.

Later this month, I will be volunteering for a local sprint racing event at a community festival. Races take place over two days of the weekend. Contestants run in the race for the first day, have their race-time recorded, and then again on the second day, again the time is recorded. The race results are the total of both days' times for each contestant. Some contestants may drop out of a race or be disqualified.

Is Numbers equipped to handle race-time tabulation like this? Someone else tried doing it last year with OpenOffice. We may go that route again, but I want to see if we can use Numbers '09 in case the other volunteer isn't available.

Central to this project will be the ability to enter data for time (hours, minutes, seconds-plus-decimal-points) and add times together.

There are several different classes of races, each one would presumably be its own spreadsheet. Entries for each contestant would be sorted by starting order, then first and last name, the contestant's hometown and state, then the contestant's assigned racing number, then the times. Contestants are all signed up well in advance of the race, so I now have all of their registration data in hand.

The desired output would naturally be the re-arrange the contestants of each race in order of results. The results would also include for final added time.

Can Numbers do this? If so, how hard is it to do?

MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.33 GHz, 500 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.2), iWork 2009, OpenOffice 3, Microsoft Office v.X:Mac

Posted on Jan 6, 2010 6:17 PM

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Answer 1

Badunit

Level 7

30,834 points

Jan 6, 2010 8:09 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

You can format a cell for hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. Choose the duration format. Grab the right side of the slider over the "Hr Min Sec" and stretch it over the Ms. Then you can enter a value such as 1h 2m 3s 456ms into the cell. If you prefer it formatted as 1:02:03.456, you can choose it in the box that say "format" and you'll enter the time as 1:2:3.456.

You can add/sum two of these cells to get a total time. You can even do an average if you want to.

You can sort the table one way and then sort it another later.

Should be really easy to do. Create a table with a header row, no header column. In the header row put the words Starting Order, First Name, Last Name, Hometown, State, Racing Number, Day 1 Time, Day 2 Time, Total Time, Rank. All these would be in separate cells in the row. Most of this data will be typed in. The total will be the sum of the two days. The rank can be determined by a formula such as this (assuming Column I is the total time):

J2=RANK(I,I,1) (that's two capital letter i's and a one in there)
fill this down to the last row of the table.

That'll rank them in order by total time with fastest time being #1.

You can sort by a single column by right clicking on the column letter. You can do a nested sort via the reorganize window.

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Answer 2

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 7, 2010 9:16 AM in response to Badunit

Thank you.

Depending on how this festival develops, I'll give it a try.

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Answer 3

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 7, 2010 8:13 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

Is there a tutorial resource I can turn to, like a "spreadsheet mechanics for dummies", that will help me get coordinated quickly with spreadsheets in general and Numbers in particular?

Thanks in advance,

--WA

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Answer 4

Jan 7, 2010 8:27 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

WA,

The Numbers User Guide is written at a rather accessible level. Give it a try. Download from the Numbers Help Menu. There's a companion document called Formulas and Functions User Guide that is good to have available too. It looks more intimidating than the Numbers User Guide, but it's not as bad as it looks - basically a compilation of the Help for the Functions.

Jerry

Message was edited by: Jerrold Green1

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Answer 5

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 7, 2010 9:15 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

Very interesting. Thank you for the reference.

I also checked out the User Guides for Pages and Keynote. Are there other supplemental guides (like the Formula & Functions Guide) for these other apps?

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Answer 6

Barry

Level 9

60,029 points

Jan 7, 2010 11:59 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

Just the four guides in the set—the User Guide for each of the applications plus the Formulas and Functions guide.

Regards,
Barry

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Answer 7

Jan 8, 2010 5:04 AM in response to Walt Atwood3

Walt,

The Formulas and Functions guide is separate because the functions work the same in any Table, regardless of the app.

Jerry

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Answer 8

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 11, 2010 5:17 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

Here's another angle:

If I use iWork for this project, I will likely be sharing the end-product with news media and racing web-sites in XLS format. How much of Apple's fancy features will the Excel format allow me to get away with?

If you look at Apple's demo videos on their web-site, they make it look so easy to splash text and graphics all over a spreadsheet.

Also: how does Numbers handle multiple worksheets?

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Answer 9

Jan 11, 2010 6:57 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

Walt Atwood3 wrote:
How much of Apple's fancy features will the Excel format allow me to get away with?

Walt, none of the fancy stuff will survive an export to xls. In fact, each table will end up on a different sheet in the xls workbook and you may have to go to extra work just to make sure the sheets are in a particular order.

Also: how does Numbers handle multiple worksheets?

Not sure what your concern is here, so you'll have to explain further. Numbers will of course do many Sheets in a single document. If you plan to export to xls, keep everything as simple as you can. Give the Sheets logical descriptive names. You'll lose the advantages of Headers and Footers too, so that's another area to check when you export to make sure the result makes sense.

Jerry

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Answer 10

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 11, 2010 8:06 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

The news media outlets/race web-sites I send my final race results to prefer the tabulations to be in either Microsoft Word (DOC) or Excel (XLS) format so they can digest it easily. I manually typed in last year's race results into formatted tables in Word, each race had its own table with the results sorted by place with the contestant's name, hometown, home state, and times totaled. All this had to be done after the races were over and everything was torn down.

The spreadsheets done last year in OpenOffice Calc allowed us to figure out the racers' times on the spot so we could award the places in each race. The Calc spreadhseets were set up similar to what you would expect in Excel, with each race on a different worksheet. All the volunteers had to do was put the times into the proper cells and the spreadsheet figured the results.

Can Numbers do this for a plain XLS file that could be exported to tables in Word? If so, we could send out a DOC file to our news contacts and that would make them very happy. (Note: most of our contacts do not have recent versions of Word or Excel, so newer and fancier file formats are discouraged anyway.)

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Answer 11

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 11, 2010 8:23 PM in response to Walt Atwood3

Here's a look at what I'm trying to accomplish.

These are last year's race results:

http://sites.google.com/site/waltsimplesite/LobdellRaceResults2-2009.pdf?attredi rects=0

This link leads to a PDF file I just uploaded. Sorry if this seems a clumsy way to do things.

Message was edited by: Walt Atwood3

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Answer 12

Jan 12, 2010 8:43 AM in response to Walt Atwood3

Walt,

That's a very nice layout. If I were you, I'd stick with Numbers and Copy/Paste Values tables out of Numbers into some sort of transfer document - TextEdit for instance - for data transmission to the news folks.

Jerry

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Answer 13

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 12, 2010 11:27 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

The ultimate goal would be to transfer the results numbers (seen in the PDF) to Word, where I can then show them in tables. That way I can share them as DOC or DOC-derived PDF files with whomever. Some of the newspapers around here are using pretty old equipment, so my output has to remain stuck in the past.

How well would Numbers tables transfer to Pages? And how well would Pages be able to produce a DOC file (with tables in it) that would be readable by Word?

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Answer 14

Jan 12, 2010 11:45 AM in response to Walt Atwood3

Walt Atwood3 wrote:
How well would Numbers tables transfer to Pages? And how well would Pages be able to produce a DOC file (with tables in it) that would be readable by Word?

Walt,

I think that would work pretty well, but I don't have any way to check it out for you right now. Give it a try.

Jerry

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Answer 15

Walt Atwood3 Author

Level 2

236 points

Jan 18, 2010 9:30 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

I am considering a different approach:

I am thinking about taking a laptop to the festival, loaded with iWork 2009.

I would create a new no-frills Numbers file for each race (there are several races, each with its own list of contestants). For each race, I would put in the times, and produce the results.

Once I take the laptop home, I would save the Numbers files as XLS spreadsheets, making each one into a worksheet to form a combined Excel workbook. I would then transfer the Excel workbook to an old iMac I use that has Microsoft Office loaded, and I could then open the workbook in Excel, transfer the workskeets to Word, and make my race results that way.

Does that sound like it could work?

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