NCAA Scorekeeper Information

Features

NCAA Scorekeeper is a program that tracks people's brackets for the NCAA Men's College Basketball tournament. You can:

• Track up to 5000 brackets per pool
• Fill out a bracket easily with just a few clicks
• Distribute NCAA Scorekeeper to everyone in your pool so they can fill out their brackets
• Quickly input the winners of the games
• Change the number of points each round is worth, or give points equal to the winning team's seed
• See a list of the brackets, listed in order by total points, at any time during the pool
• Export the totals to a text document or an HTML file

• NOTE: NCAA Scorekeeper will not work on Windows 3.1 and versions of NT lower than 4.0.
• Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7
• 5 MB free hard drive space (Visual Basic 6 runtime files included)
• At least Pentium 150 MHz Recommended
• At least 16 MB Ram (64 MB Recommended)
• At least 800x600 screen resolution (1024x768 or higher recommended)

• File
  • New - Pool (Year) (Ctrl+N) / Single Set of Picks (Ctrl+E) / Team List File (Ctrl+T) — Create a new Year/Single Set of Picks/Team List file. These are described a little more thoroughly below.
  • Open - Pool (Year) (Ctrl+O) / Single Set of Picks / Team List File — Open one of these kinds of files. They can also be opened by double-clicking them in Windows Explorer.
  • Save (Ctrl+S) / Save As — Save your file, or save it under a new name. The file name will appear at the bottom of the screen. If the file name is cut off, move your cursor over the file name, and a tooltip window will appear with the full filename.
  • Import Team List (Ctrl+M) — Import a list of teams into your bracket. This option is only available while creating a Single Picks file or a Pool/Year file.
  • Download This Year's Team List — Downloads the current year's team list file directly from the NCAA Scorekeeper website.
    NOTE - On some computers, this will not work. If this happens, click on Download this year's Team List File in your NCAA Scorekeeper folder.
  • Print (Ctrl+P) — Print the current pick. There is no Print dialog box, so it will print to your default printer.
    NOTE - Printing may not work correctly. On my tests, the print was aligned at the top left corner.
  • Exit (F4) — Exit the program.
• Pool (or Year in versions 2.1 and earlier) (this menu is only available when a Pool/Year file is opened)
  • View List of Picks (Ctrl+L) — Displays a list of brackets in the pool. You can also view the selected bracket, delete it, add a new one, import or update brackets, or view the winners.
  • Add New Pick (Ctrl+A) — Add a new bracket to the pool. You can also do this in the List of Picks window mentioned above.
  • Import Single Picks (Ctrl+I) — Import single pick files into your pool. You can select "Replace the old one with the new one" if you want a person that already exists in the pool to be replaced - this is useful if you are updating someone's file. You can also choose to have the duplicate be ignored or have a number added to distinguish it from the other one. Also, if you want to save a step, check "Import the team list from one of these single pick files", so you don't have to click Import Team List from the File menu and import it from there. This is checked by default.
  • Export This Single Pick — Export the bracket you are current viewing into a single pick file.
  • Display Current Rankings (Ctrl+D) — Display a list of all the people in the pool, ranked according to how many points they have. As of version 2.0, you can also output this list to a text file or HTML file.
  • View Winners Sheet (Ctrl+W) — View the winning teams for the tournament.
  • Clear Winners Sheet — Erases the entire winners sheet.
  • Options... (F11) — Change the colors for wins and losses, and change the points per win in each round. As of version 2.0, you can also choose to score brackets based on the seed of the winning teams. NOTE - These settings will be used for all pool/year files, not just the currently opened file.
• Help
  • Online Help (F1) — Takes you to this web page.
    NOTE - On some computers, this menu item doesn't work. If it doesn't, click on NCAA Scorekeeper Home Page in the folder you install NCAA Scorekeeper to.
  • About... — Shows some information about the program. Clicking on "Mike L" will take you to my software home page.
    NOTE - On some computers, clicking on "Mike L" will do nothing. If this happens, click on "Mike L's software home page" in the folder you install NCAA Scorekeeper to.

Team list files contain just the list of teams for the year's tournament. Their file extension is *.ntf. Usually you will not have to worry about these files, because each year I will post the team list at the Download Team List page. If you're creating a team list from scratch, go to File>New>Team List, then type in the team names in the gray boxes and save the file.

Single Pick Files

Single pick files are what each pool participant will create to store their picks. Their file extension is *.nsf. Steps on how to create them:

1. Go to File>New>Single Set of Picks.
2. Go to File>Import Team List.
3. Select the team list file you are using.
4. Type your name and the tiebreaker points.
5. Click on the teams you want to pick.
6. Save your file.

Pool files (also called year files) contain everything you need to run a pool - the list of teams, the winners, and each person's picks. Their file extension is *.nyf. You can have up to 5000 picks in your pool. Steps on how to create and use them:

1. If your pool is for the March Madness NCAA Men's College Basketball, go to File>Download This Year's Team List or click on Download This Year's Team List in your NCAA Scorekeeper folder. If it's not, see the Team List files section.
2. If you are the pool manager, it is recommended that you keep the setup package for NCAA Scorekeeper so you can send it to the participants of the pool. It is also recommended to send them the team list. Then each participant can easily create their picks. Ask the participants to send their pick files back to you so you can add them to the pool/year file that you will create in the next steps.
3. Go to File>New>Pool/Year.
4. Go to File>Import Team List and open the team list you want to use. Note - there is a way to skip this step. Read step 5 to see how.
5. Go to Pool>Import Single Picks to import pick files you have. If you want to skip step 4, make sure "Import the team list from one of these single pick files" is checked. Since all the single picks have the team lists already in them, selecting this option will take the team list directly from these files, so you don't have to use Import Team List from the File menu.
6. If you want to add a bracket from scratch, go to Pool>View List of Picks and click Add New Pick, or (as of version 2.2) go to Pool>Add New Pick. Then do steps 4 and 5 under the Single Picks section for each pick you add.
7. As the tournament continues, go to Pool>View Winners Sheet and click on the teams that won their games to select them as the winner.
8. To check a person's picks, go to Pool>View List of Picks and double-click on a bracket. The games they picked correctly will be highlighted in red, and the incorrect ones will be black. Their total score so far will be at the bottom in red.
9. Click on Pool>Options to change the colors of correct and incorrect picks, and change how many points each round is worth.
10. Click on Pool>Display Current Rankings to see a list of everyone in order by how many total points they have. Here you can also export this list to a text file or an HTML file. If exporting to an HTML file, you can choose to display the totals in a list or in a table.