Microsoft Office – Page 2 – Shane's Computer Solution Repository

2021 NHL schedule and results in Excel .xlsx and csv formats

The post you’re currently reading is about the 2021 NHL schedule. If you’re looking for the 2023/24 NHL schedule, you can find it in this post. If you want the 2022/23 schedule, it’s in this post. And the 2021/22 schedule is here.

Here’s a copy of the 2021 NHL schedule and the results of each of the games played so far in Excel .xlsx format, and here’s another copy in CSV format. They are up-to-date up to last night, and I’ll try to update them each morning through the regular season.

The Excel file consists of 2 worksheets: one contains the original NHL schedule as described in this post; the other, named As-Played Schedule, contains the same contents, with the addition of the scores for each team and whether the game hasn’t been played yet, was won in regulation time, overtime, or in a shootout. Here’s a quick summary of the columns:

Date: the date of the game
Start Time (Sask): the game’s start time in Saskatchewan (where I live!)
Start Time (ET): the game’s start time in Eastern time (which is the time the NHL website shows)
Visitor: the name of the visiting team
Score: the visiting team’s score if the game has been played, otherwise blank
Home: the name of the home team
Score: the home team’s score if the game has been played, otherwise blank
Status: one of the following:
- Scheduled: if the game hasn’t been played yet
- Regulation: if the game ended in regulation time
- OT: if the game ended in overtime
- SO: if the game ended in a shootout

For example, here’s the first couple lines of the worksheet:

In this example, the game was played on January 13, 2021 at 4:30 PM in Saskatchewan and 5:30 PM Eastern time, the home team Philadelphia beat the visiting team Pittsburgh 6-3 in regulation time

Just a brief explanation why I’ve got two time fields in here. Saskatchewan doesn’t observe Daylight Savings time, so for the first part of the schedule, we have a one-hour time difference from Eastern time, but once the rest of the country leaps forward, we have a two-hour time difference. Of course, I’m more interested in the time in Saskatchewan, but to make it easier for other people to use, I’ve also included Eastern time.

The CSV file contains only the As-Played worksheet. It has the same fields as described for the Excel file. You can easily import this file into Excel or whatever spreadsheet of your choice!

The 2021 NHL Schedule in Excel .xlsx format

Note: If you’re looking for the 2021/22 NHL schedule in Excel or CSV format, you can find it in this post.

Here’s a copy of the 2020/21 NHL schedule in Excel .xlsx format.

In a previous post, I posted a copy of the original 2020/21 NHL schedule in CSV format. I’ve seen quite a few people looking for a schedule in Excel .xlsx format. Although you can quite easily import a CSV file into Excel, I thought I might import it myself, apply a little bit of formatting to the file, and make it available, too. You can get it here.

Update: you might also be interested in a spreadsheet that also contains the results. You can read about it in this post.

Be aware that this is the schedule as of January 12, 2021. In my original post, I said that I wouldn’t be surprised if the schedule changes, either due to weather-related game cancellations, or, more likely, changes due to COVID. Well, that has definitely happened, even last night when the St. Louis Blues and Vegas Golden Knights game was postponed due to COVID. That is NOT reflected in this schedule; this is the original schedule before any changes were made.

This spreadsheet contains 5 fields. The first field is the date of the game, the second field is the game’s start time in Saskatchewan (where I live!), the third field is the game’s start time in Eastern Time (which is the time the NHL website shows), the fourth field is the visiting team, and the fifth field is the home team.

Here’s a screenshot of the first few lines of the file:

The first line, obviously, is the header line, giving a brief description of each of the fields. The second line, and all subsequent lines, list the games in the schedule, one for each game. For the first game shown here, we can see:

the date of the first game is January 13, 2021
the game starts at 4:30 p.m. Saskatchewan time
the game starts at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time
the visiting team is the Pittsburgh Penguins
the home team is the Philadelphia Flyers

If you can make use of this file, have fun!

Formatting percentages in Microsoft Word mail merges

When I mark student assignments, I usually put the students’ marks and comments in a spreadsheet, then I do a mail merge to send out the marks to the students. I like doing it this way because then I’ve got a copy of all the comments and marks that I’ve given the students, and I can do some simple calculations to see how effective my teaching has been in different areas of the course material. I’m also more able to be sure that I’m giving similar comments and marks for similar work.

The only problem I have, though, is that when I do a mail merge, the formatting of my calculated numbers is thrown off, and the worst is the percentages. I know that there’s a way to format them correctly, but I can never remember how to do it, and the notes I’ve kept don’t seem to always work, and I’ve never quite got my head wrapped around the way it works. Until now!!!

I ran across this web page that really helped me to understand what’s going on. While it’s still fresh in my mind, I wanted to write a blog post explaining it so that the next time I need to do this, I’ve got something to reference, and hopefully it will be helpful for other people, too!

Note that I’m using Microsoft Office 2010, although that webpage is for Office 2003, so I’m sure it works with other versions.

Update, Feb. 25, 2014: In the comments below, “Anna” mentioned that she’s verified that this also works in Office 2013.

Let’s start off with a simple spreadsheet. I’ll assume I’ve got an assignment with 3 questions on it, each worth 10 marks. I’ll record the marks for the students in that spreadsheet, then have a column that calculates the total marks, and another that calculates the percentage. The spreadsheet looks like this:

Then, I set up a mail merge document in Word, add in the fields from the spreadsheet, and get a document that looks like this:

So that looks OK, but when I look at it in preview mode, I’ve lost all of the formatting on my percentage field:

The problem is that when I do a mail merge, the number is transferred from Excel to Word, but the formatting is not. The solution is to tell Word how I want to format this percentage field. To do that, I need to mess around with “field codes”. A better explanation is probably given here, but here’s a step-by-step description of how I do this.

First, we need to see the field codes. Press ALT-F9 to display the field codes (pressing ALT-F9 again will undo this). You’ll see:

We need to specify that we want to format this field differently. Place the insertion point after the “MERGEFIELD Pct”, and type in:

\# #0.0

The “\#” tells Word that it should format this field as a number, and the “#0.0” tells it which specific format it should use for the number. I find it a little confusing because the octothorpe character is being used for multiple things: both to say that this field should be formatted as a number, and to say how that number is to be formatted. Anyways, “#0.0” tells Word to use up to two numbers before the decimal point and to include a single zero if the integer part of the number is zero, and to use exactly one number after the decimal point, even if that number is 0. As I understand it, “#” means display the digit if you need it or a space if you don’t (when you’ve got a leading or trailing zero), and “0” means always display the digit. Anyways, our field now looks like:

Let’s look at how this gets formatted. Press ALT-F9, then turn off and turn back on the preview results. Now we see:

Well, that’s close, but it’s not quite right, obviously. The problem is that the number is 0.8, not 80 (a decimal number, not a percentage). To get it to display it as a percentage, we need to tell Word to multiply that value by 100. To do this, first we need to highlight the merge field. Highlight “MERGEFIELD” and the name of the field, as shown:

Once you’ve done that, press CTRL-F9 to embed this mergefield into another field. Now we’ve got:

Notice the extra set of curly braces around the mergefield. It is extremely important that the curly braces be added by pressing CTRL-F9; if you type in the braces manually, it’s not going to work.

Once you’ve got this merge field embedded in another field, we can tell Word to do a calculation with it. Add an equals sign in front of the merge field, and “*100” after it; this tells it to multiply the value of that field by 100, making it a percentage rather than a decimal. It should look like:

Now, press ALT-F9 to turn off the display of the field codes, turn the merge preview results off then back on, and then we should see what we want!

I hope this helps!!!