As many of you know, I'm intending to try and get more boards/sites involved and run a much bigger pick 'em for Wimby if we can make it feasible to run it without the master spreadsheet (or Bethan or me, for that matter) cracking under the strain!
 
Two reasons - 1) because it would be fun  and 2) to tempt more people to have a look at this site. Indeed, another reason we've got to make sure we can get it right before we publicise it is because if we don't, we'll probably never see the people from the other boards again!

As far as entries are concerned, the main two things we need are a more efficient (and more professional-looking) Excel-free entry system and (to avoid making the master spreadsheet so big that it grinds to a halt), one that spews out just a string of values we can paste into the master spreadsheet instead of a whole spreadsheet for each entrant.
 
I've been working on the entry system and I've come up with the web-based entry sheet at http://www.britishtennis.net/07pickem/pickemef.htm. As well as being Excel-free and hopefully easy to use, it prevents some of the errors entrants make and flags up far more obviously any it can't prevent, with a note telling the entrant how their entry will be treated if they don't correct it so we won't have to do as much chasing up as usual.

Please have a look at that page, have a play with it and let me have your comments, good or (especially) bad, i.e. problem reports, over the next few days so that the final version can be as user-friendly as possible. I need data to do comparative testing with too, so if you have time over the next few days, please also re-do your RG pick 'em entry using the new form.

For those of you who looked at the first draft at the weekend, the most obvious improvement since then is that you just tick checkboxes to pick matchwinners rather than having to move to a cell and then type 1. I wish it could be radio buttons (where if you select one, it automatically deselects the other one) but to cut a long story short, if I get radio buttons to appear in the right places in IE, they appear all over the place in Mozilla and vice versa.

If it works well, the only real drawback of this system is that you can't do some of your picks, save the sheet then come back and do the rest later - though you can come back later if you leave the part-completed form up on your screen while you are away. You can always print the draw and do your picks on paper first, though, and hopefully the improved ease of use plus not having to download spreadsheets and fiddle about attaching them to an email will make up for it!

Sheddie - even if you like the new entry sheet, don't get too excited yet.  There is still plenty of tedious work to do between now and Wimby to incorporate the new entry data structure into the results calculations.

P.S. I could do with the BT logo in as high-res as possible, the one on the page was cropped out of the current site banner and is a bit fuzzy.

-- Edited by steven at 17:59, 2007-05-28