Building an Excel Football League Table — Traditional vs Dynamic Array Methods

Introduction

I am going to show you the different ways you can build a football league table in Excel. Some of the methods are old school, but others utilise Excel’s new capabilities.

In case you weren’t already aware, Excel has undergone a big change to its calculation engine fairly recently. The concept of dynamic arrays was first introduced back in September 2018, however, for many Microsoft 365 users the first batch of new functions took an awfully long time to appear. Unless you have been an Office Insider, you will not have been able to use them. Even though the update was rolled out to my copy towards the start of the year, there were still swathes of users who were kept waiting.

Since dynamic arrays were introduced in Excel, array formulas no long require you to press Ctrl + Shift + Return every time you edit a cell. This was an annoying practice that made many users, including myself, reluctant to use arrays. They just didn’t feel like a native and integrated part of Excel. Now you can use an array formula like any other — without that additional step.

If you want to find out more about the new functions, I recommend you visit Microsoft’s help page for each one: XLOOKUP, FILTER, UNIQUE, SORTBY, SORT, SEQUENCE, RANDARRAY.