Community Spotlight: Craig Willett

It was just a usual day at Rows, when I saw my colleague Tricia’s slack message about this user who was building a Major League Baseball (MLB) spreadsheet for his “⚾ Baseball HR Fantasy League”.

If this was some other company, you’d probably go like: “Baseball? Sports? What does this have to do with spreadsheets?...” 🤷🏼‍♀️

But here at Rows, we know that spreadsheets are not just for business. There is so much more you can do with them. And so does Craig Willett, a Cincinnati Reds fan from Ohio, USA.

If you use Rows you also probably think of spreadsheets for pretty much everything in your life. 🤣

I was intrigued by this message, so I immediately followed up with Tricia asking to get to know Craig and what he was doing in Rows.

Craig agreed to hop on a call with us right away to bat a few ideas around (ok, enough with the baseball analogies).

Craig is an Automation Engineer at Fox Sports. Among many other things, he is in charge of running his co-workers Fantasy League. They build their teams using MLB’s players home runs from last year, and then, they’re off!

Craig used to do this on a…, well, let’s just say he didn’t do it on Rows. The “old way” took him hours: first, getting the players data out of the MLB.com website, then adding it to another platform to compute it. Also, when anyone wanted to check how they were doing, the spreadsheet took ages to load and refresh. Naturally, people were not so engaged with the Fantasy League.

He read about Rows on TechRadar and decided to give it a try. In a matter of hours, Craig had set up his entire HR Fantasy League spreadsheet on Rows, including:

• Importing the MLB.com players data through an API.

• A way for people to build their fantasy team using forms.

• A feedback system where Craig’s colleagues can report issues with the tool that automatically land on Craig’s inbox.

  A table in Craig’s MLB spreadsheet with the player rosters

  The Live mode of the spreadsheet was one of the key aspects for Craig. Being able to share the spreadsheet with his co-workers, so they can use it  without messing it up and check their status on any mobile device was a home run for Craig.

  So, this is how it works for them:

  At the start of the season, each person submits their roster, using the Roster Entry form (once the season starts, the form is set as Hidden on live, preventing new roster submissions):

  Roster Entry form

  Everyday, the home run stats are automatically updated (using the SCHEDULE function).

  Finally, everyone can see the live leaderboard, showing the global scores of each roster (showing just a snippet below):

  Craig’s MLB Leaderboard (partial view)

  “It's phenomenal. Not gonna lie, and it is set up beautifully.”

  The best part? We got Craig to share his piece of art at the Rows Community. This is not the fully loaded version that Craig is (always) building, but you’ll see you can still see (and learn from) so much of Craig’s work in setting this up. Click here to visit Craig’s workspace on Rows and duplicate his spreadsheet to your own workspace.

  For future projects, Craig is already looking into how he can use Rows in his work and other projects, including a collaborative schedule for parents to use to manager their kids’ little league.

We mentioned that Craig's favourite MLB team is the Cincinnati Reds, but here’s the kicker: he’s really not much of a baseball fan:

“I get in this HR Derby just to keep me interested throughout the whole season”. 

Well, I would say, lucky us, as Baseball got Craig into Rows!

⚾️ Browse Craig’s public workspace for more of his spreadsheets creativity. If you would like to get in touch with him you can do so at “craig [dot] willett [at] gmail [dot] com”.

👩🏽‍💻 Learn more about Rows at rows.com and sign up here.

The spreadsheets in this post are just a hint of what’s possible to achieve with Rows. You can find these and many other at our Community page.

📽 In our YouTube channel you can find many short, to-the-point, tutorials on a wide rage of topics - and we’re adding more on a regular basis.

🙌 [object Object] where we’re nurturing a community FOR spreadsheet lovers, BY spreadsheet lovers, and where we welcome conversations about all kinds of spreadsheets, not just Rows spreadsheets. 🙋You can ask for help or 🤗 help someone in need, share your experiences and knowledge. Or just hang out and have fun. Yes, spreadsheets can be fun!