Is it possible to use excel to create a schedule for 32 teams playing 12 games of various lengths?

corpcup24 

Changing Division Identifiers and Team Identifiers

On the Game Schedule worksheet, change the top row headers manually as required.  (That is row 3, assuming you have not added/removed rows above those top headers.)

Another worksheet that requires changes is whichever sheet you are going to use going forward. I'll assume worksheet 2024-03A. To change the team identifiers to O<n> and W<n>:

1. Select all the cells (and only the cells) with team identifiers in column A. (If your Excel window is large enough for it, a message "Count: 65" should appear at the bottom of the window.)
2. Press Ctrl+H (or go to the Home menu, Editing section, click Find & Select, and then Replace…). The Find and Replace dialog appears. Fill it out such that it looks like the screenshot below (A in the "Find what:" box, O in the "Replace with:" box, etc.).
3. Click the Replace All button. If you did the above correctly, a message about "made 33 replacements" should appear. Click OK to dismiss it.
4. With the Find and Replace dialog still open, replace the A and O with B and W, respectively.
   Again click the Replace All button. If you did the above correctly, a message about "made 32 replacements" should appear. Click OK to dismiss it.
5. Click the Close button to dismiss the Find and Replace dialog.
6. If that column looks correct, save your workbook.

That's the first half of the work. Now do those same steps again, but instead of selecting cells in column A in step 1, select cells in column G. The number of replacements will be different (321 and 288, IIRC), but otherwise the steps are the same. If you have automatic calculation turned on (the default), Excel will automatically recalculate formulas in column O, so you won't manually make changes there.

The Game Schedule worksheet will then likely need cosmetic changes. The larger letters (O and W take up more horizontal space than A and B) will probably require you to resize some columns (or change the font).  And you then may need to resize some rows, also.  (Whoever set up your original Game Schedule worksheet specified "Wrap text" for cells in the interior of its grid (I know of no reason why). So I left that enabled. But for this worksheet, text wrap can cause extra work.)

That completes the changes. Save the workbook.

Adding Schedulable Times

On the Reference worksheet, add the new times to the (bottom of) Excel table tblTimes. You can just click on the last entry, press Tab, and enter a new time, press Tab, enter a new time, etc. When all eight new times are in place, the table should extend to spreadsheet row 71. Then, with any of the times selected, on the Data menu click Sort. All other times in this table will be automatically selected, and the Sort dialog will appear. As there is only one column of data (Schedulable Time) in this table, the dialog will prepopulate the "Sort by" dropdown. So just click OK.

On worksheet Game Schedule, insert 8 rows immediately beneath the 1:00 PM time. (Yes, beneath; the result will be easier to work with.) In column A, overtype the 1:00 PM time with 12:20 PM, and fill in the remaining new times, in order. Then copy all of column A (click Excel's "A", and then press Ctrl+C) and paste it over column Z (click Excel's "Z", and then press Ctrl+V).

Now is a good time to save a backup copy of the workbook.

All of the formulas inside the "grid area" of the Game Schedule worksheet (up through 5:35 PM) are essentially the same. As you copy and paste a "grid area" cell from one cell to another, Excel will modify the addresses in their formulas appropriately. So assuming that the 12:20 PM row is now row 8, select cell B8. Copy it, and paste it over the rectangular range B9 through Y16. Save the workbook.

As games can start earlier, you may be adding games. But I expect that you will also be changing some/many/all of the start times for the roughly 700 existing entries on worksheet Sched 2024-03A (or better, a copy of it). So at this point you have options to consider:

• Manually change the start times. You could use a combination of: 1) selecting the new start time from the dropdown list and 2) copying and pasting the new times from one location to another. If the number of intended changes is small, this is definitely the preferred way to go.
• If you expect that you can use one or more formulas to adjust all or a large number of start times (for example) forward by 40 minutes, you may be disappointed. This will be tricky, because of: 1) the way Excel stores times (fractional portions of a day; e.g., 3:00 PM is stored as 0.625 and 3:05 PM is 0.628472222222…); 2) the limited precision with which computers store most non-integer values; 3) the fact that the current FILTER function used in the Game Schedule formulas needs an exact match of times (to the nanosecond or better); and 4) doing arithmetic on time values can result in loss of precision. The Game Schedule formulas could be changed, but I'm not going to get into that unless we know that's the best option.

General Thoughts

« …this is EXACTLY what I was hoping existed »
It's good that it's what you were hoping for, but let's be clear that this Game Schedule worksheet and the others were not an off-the-shelf solution. It did not "exist" (in the sense of having useful formulas) until I cleaned up some of the data, created and loaded the problem-specific supporting data structures, and created the formulas. While I would make additional changes if I started anew, I spent considerable time to re-create the workbook.

It is tedious for me to write for this discussion at this level (i.e., using precise and explicit wording for someone who claims to be clueless about Excel). You may need to find someone locally to assist you for major maintenance tasks like the above.