Alright, let me walk you through how I tackled creating a fillable NBA playoff bracket. It was a fun little project, and I learned a bunch along the way.
First off, I started with the basics. I needed a bracket template. I scoured the internet for a clean, simple one that I could easily modify. Found a decent image, but it wasn’t fillable, obviously. So, I figured, “Why not build one from scratch?”
Then, I jumped into Google Sheets. Yeah, I know, maybe not the sexiest tool, but it’s accessible and easy to share. I started mapping out the bracket structure, figuring out the cell arrangement for each round – first round, conference semis, conference finals, and the NBA Finals. It was a lot of fiddling with cell sizes and borders to get it looking somewhat presentable.
Next up was adding the teams. This is where it got a bit tedious. I manually entered the team names, leaving space for the winners. I thought about using some kind of API to pull the team data automatically, but honestly, it felt like overkill for this project. Maybe next time.
The fillable part was key. I wanted people to be able to click and select the winning team for each matchup. I used Data Validation in Google Sheets to create dropdown lists for each game. Each list included the two teams playing in that game. Simple, but effective.
I added some conditional formatting to make it look a little nicer. For example, when you pick a team as the winner, I highlighted their cell in green. Nothing fancy, but it provided a visual cue that you’d made your pick.
To make it a bit more user-friendly, I added a “reset” button using a simple script. This cleared all the selections, so you could easily start over if you messed up your predictions. It’s just a simple function in Google Apps Script that loops through the cells with the dropdowns and clears their contents.
After that, it was all about testing. I filled out the bracket myself a bunch of times, making sure everything worked as expected. Found a few minor bugs – like a dropdown not showing up correctly – and fixed them.
Finally, I shared it with some friends. Got some good feedback, made a few tweaks based on their suggestions. They pointed out a couple of places where the formatting was off, and I cleaned those up.
So, there you have it. A simple, fillable NBA playoff bracket built in Google Sheets. It’s not the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it gets the job done, and it was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Plus, now I’m ready for the playoffs!
