You've probably seen the story of Chelsea Banning in the news lately. 37 people RSVP'd to her book signing and only two showed up. That is DOUBLE the turnout for my Manhattan book signing in 2003. Also in the episode: two faster ways to generate all 729 combinations of the outcome of World Cup Group Match Play.
Thanks to Exceλambda and Kyle F. for faster ways to generate all combinations of 0, 1, and 2 for 6 World Cup Group Stage Matches.
Thanks to Exceλambda and Kyle F. for faster ways to generate all combinations of 0, 1, and 2 for 6 World Cup Group Stage Matches.
Transcript of the video:
Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast.
Episode 2352, lonely book signings and a faster way to generate 729 combos.
The story has been in the news, Cleveland author, Chelsea Banning, had a book signing outside of Cleveland.
37 people said they were going and only 2 people signed up to the author's signing.
She's gotten so many responses from authors who have had similar horror stories. Boy, it took me back to October of 2003.
I was in Akron, Ohio and we booked this book signing in Manhattan at the Computer Book Works, it was a great computer book store right in New York City.
The whole family went up, just a lot of planning and expense and exactly one person, Dave from Connecticut ...
Hey, Dave, showed up at that book signing.
So, Chelsea, don't feel bad, two seems like a huge group.
Also, out in Laguna Beach, actually this was Irvine, the Irvine Sci-Tech Book Store, we had three people plus a girlfriend and a kid show up for this signing. So, far more successful.
Although it's funny, about four months later those books were sold through the cash register at the book store and I get a letter saying that they were bankrupt and could not pay.
Oh, well, everyone has their horrible book-signing stories. All right, the story for today.
In episode 2351 I built this huge model, spent 15 minutes, to predict that perhaps 28.4% of the World Cup groups would end up in a tie.
And here to report that there were one, two, three of the eight, three of the eight ended up with a tie breaker.
So you go three divided by eight is 37-1/2%, so order of magnitude pretty close to the prediction.
But the real reason I'm here today is during the process of demonstrating that, I had to build these 729 combinations.
Where for each of the 6 games in a group, we had to iterate through the various values of 0 for a draw, 1 for the team on the top wins, 2 for the team on the side wins.
And I came up with the best method I could think of by typing zero, one, two, and then this formula here and then all of the formulas to the left of that using this formula here.
It was ugly, but it worked, but of course there are better ways to do that.
Thanks to Excel LAMBDA for giving us this single-cell formula for generating the entire sequence like that.
And then also, a shout-out to Kyle, Kyle who came up with another clever use for the base function. We've used base on the podcast before.
Mordechai from New York was using base to do something cool.
And Kyle's idea was to take base of all the numbers from 0 through 728 using base 3.
So in base 3, the only digits are zero, one and two, and make it be a six-digit string. And sure enough that works.
All right, so I took Kyle's formula and changed a little bit. I put the sequence function inside.
I need 729 rows, 1 column starting at 0, jumping by 1.
Show that in base 3 with six digits all the time, and there is the six results of the games in the group. So a couple of great updates there.
I will be on vacation next week, so look for something to come back in the podcast maybe around the week of December 22. Well, hey.
I want to thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
Episode 2352, lonely book signings and a faster way to generate 729 combos.
The story has been in the news, Cleveland author, Chelsea Banning, had a book signing outside of Cleveland.
37 people said they were going and only 2 people signed up to the author's signing.
She's gotten so many responses from authors who have had similar horror stories. Boy, it took me back to October of 2003.
I was in Akron, Ohio and we booked this book signing in Manhattan at the Computer Book Works, it was a great computer book store right in New York City.
The whole family went up, just a lot of planning and expense and exactly one person, Dave from Connecticut ...
Hey, Dave, showed up at that book signing.
So, Chelsea, don't feel bad, two seems like a huge group.
Also, out in Laguna Beach, actually this was Irvine, the Irvine Sci-Tech Book Store, we had three people plus a girlfriend and a kid show up for this signing. So, far more successful.
Although it's funny, about four months later those books were sold through the cash register at the book store and I get a letter saying that they were bankrupt and could not pay.
Oh, well, everyone has their horrible book-signing stories. All right, the story for today.
In episode 2351 I built this huge model, spent 15 minutes, to predict that perhaps 28.4% of the World Cup groups would end up in a tie.
And here to report that there were one, two, three of the eight, three of the eight ended up with a tie breaker.
So you go three divided by eight is 37-1/2%, so order of magnitude pretty close to the prediction.
But the real reason I'm here today is during the process of demonstrating that, I had to build these 729 combinations.
Where for each of the 6 games in a group, we had to iterate through the various values of 0 for a draw, 1 for the team on the top wins, 2 for the team on the side wins.
And I came up with the best method I could think of by typing zero, one, two, and then this formula here and then all of the formulas to the left of that using this formula here.
It was ugly, but it worked, but of course there are better ways to do that.
Thanks to Excel LAMBDA for giving us this single-cell formula for generating the entire sequence like that.
And then also, a shout-out to Kyle, Kyle who came up with another clever use for the base function. We've used base on the podcast before.
Mordechai from New York was using base to do something cool.
And Kyle's idea was to take base of all the numbers from 0 through 728 using base 3.
So in base 3, the only digits are zero, one and two, and make it be a six-digit string. And sure enough that works.
All right, so I took Kyle's formula and changed a little bit. I put the sequence function inside.
I need 729 rows, 1 column starting at 0, jumping by 1.
Show that in base 3 with six digits all the time, and there is the six results of the games in the group. So a couple of great updates there.
I will be on vacation next week, so look for something to come back in the podcast maybe around the week of December 22. Well, hey.
I want to thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
