8.15.2008

NFA 2005 not supported for Excel 2007+

Though it may not be noted in the help file yet, I have to temporarily drop support for NFA 2005 with Excel 2007 and later. An indirect result of Excel 07's increased row/column capacities is that some NFA 2005 features may not work properly if not run in a workbook with previous versions' worksheet dimensions. It's hard to say which areas of gameplay this could affect without diving into the code, which I haven't had time to do yet. Depending on how well Excel 2007+ handles legacy workbooks, this might not actually disrupt gameplay at all.

Ultimately, I'll be able to adapt the formula logic to support both pre- and post-2007 releases, but in the meantime, I can't guarantee that running NFA 2005 in Excel 2007 or later will work.

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Welcome

Welcome to the home of NFA 2005 on the web. NFA 2005 is a zero-player game that has been built into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It simulates a fictional sport, professional foxtail, in great detail and allows the user to follow the league and its players through up to 200 seasons.

Wait, what?

You don't "play" NFA 2005 so much as you watch it. You don't have any control over the players, coaches, front offices, or owners. What you can do is pick a team to root for, keep track of stats, and follow your favorite player's career. To many people, this will be exactly as boring as it sounds. For some people, though, NFA 2005 can be a rich, immersive experience that can be enjoyed on its own terms or used as the jumping-off point for meta-gaming.

That's a terrible idea.

Look, I didn't write this game with mass-market appeal in mind. In fact, it was originally just a project to help me teach myself Excel and VBA. It still is, in a way... but in the course of learning how to integrate controls and parse files as TextStream objects, I've created something that is a fun, relaxing way for me to pass the time. If anyone else out there is as weird about stats, sports, and/or Excel as me and gets some enjoyment out of it, I'll be happy.

So, what happens in NFA 2005?

A lot! NFA 2005 makes extensive use of Excel formula logic and VBA code to simulate a 30-team professional sports league. Teams fill rosters of 30 players each and play their way through an 82-game schedule. At the end of the regular season, there's a four-round playoff to determine the league champion. Along the way, teams will hire and fire coaches and general managers, sign, cut, and trade players, and may possibly change ownership and/or relocate. An amateur draft is held every offseason to replace retiring veterans and journeymen who just cleared waivers for the last time. Players can be injured (from a bout with the flu to a season-ending ACL tear), go on hot and cold streaks, or get suspended for particularly bad on-field behavior.

A player on the last year of his contract may bolt to a new team if their GM makes him a better offer, or he may stay loyal and sign an extension or a new contract with his existing team. Coaches will bench players who perform poorly, and GMs will work to piece together teams with good chemistry. Teams have a slight advantage when playing at home, as long as enough fans turn out to support them. A talented player with a quirky personality may not flourish until he's traded to a team with players and coaches that he gets along with. A team's #1 draft pick could turn out to be a bust, out of the league after a handful of seasons, and the owner may fire the GM responsible for making the pick.

This is all really just the tip of the iceberg as far as simulation details go. Suffice to say that in terms of the day-to-day and year-to-year operation of a professional sports league, it's a very realistic simulation. If that's the kind of thing that interests you, I suggest that you try it out and find something about it that you'll like.

Foxtail explained

Let me quickly distinguish fact from fantasy here. A foxtail is a real product, a sling-like throwing object that you can get for yourself at Klutz's website.They're a lot of fun to wing around, and can be thrown much farther than your average baseball or football.

The sport of foxtail is completely made up by me, really only to serve as a framework around which to build my spreadsheet. Its rules are explained in full detail in NFA 2005's Help section, but essentially, it's a lot like lacrosse. Teams of ten players each try to advance the foxtail up the field, attempting to score goals by shooting it through the opposition's net. There are a few quirks that aren't typically seen in other team sports, but for the most part, the rules are straightforward and simple.

It probably goes without saying that the NFA or National Foxtail Association is also a figment of my imagination, being based on a fictional sport.

Requirements

Since NFA 2005 is really just an Excel spreadsheet, not a compiled program, you will need Excel to run it. Because of the large amount of formula tricks and VBA code being used, free viewers and substitutes will not work (at least, none that I know of), nor will importing into Quattro Pro or other spreadsheet software. NFA 2005 has undergone a fair amount of testing on all Windows versions of Excel since '97, and it seems to work fine with all of them. Older versions of Excel do not support VBA, and as such will not be able to run NFA 2005.

NFA 2005 is essentially a huge number-crunch, which means that hardware requirements are very lax. In a nutshell, any machine from the past 10 years should have no trouble running it, though more powerful processors will certainly speed up the simulation noticeably. Anything over 1 GHz is enough to keep me from getting irritated. There's no memory requirement to speak of, and the most space it should take up on your hard drive is around 250 MB, unless you've generated a lot of all-time stat sheets.

You MUST have macros enabled in order to run NFA 2005. If Excel asks you if you want to enable them when you open the spreadsheet, you must click [Yes]. If macros are automatically disabled, you must go to the Macro Security setting in Excel and set the Security Level to Medium or Low. Failing to enable macros will render NFA 2005 inoperable (none of the buttons will do anything).

While not a strict requirement, NFA 2005 was designed to use a few fonts that may not be available by default in your system. So, in order for it to look its best, make sure you download and install the NFA 2005 fonts provided below (they'll also make this site look a lot better).

IMPORTANT: If you're using Excel 2003, there is a good chance that your copy of Excel has a bugged random number generator. Unfortunately, in NFA 2005, this will cause major problems to the point of it eventually storing bad data and throwing an error when you try to sim games. At that point, you may not be able to recover, even if you subsequently reset the season. So, please make sure that you're fully patched up through Office Update if you're using Excel 2003. The game automatically checks for the bug when initiating a league, so you should be OK in that case. However, if you copy your NFA 2005 files over to another computer after your league has been set up, there will be no automatic error checking and it will be up to you to ensure that the bug is not present.

To further complicate matters, the bug's nature is to only appear after a large number of calculations have been done. So, you could sim through half of a season with no problems, save and close NFA 2005, and sim the other half later. If you go through your seasons in small chunks like this, you're not likely to find the error until it's too late. So, please make sure the random number bug is taken care of before you try using NFA 2005.

Some people may prefer to patch Excel directly instead of going through the Office Update site. To this end, Microsoft's standalone random number bug patch is available in the Download section.


Downloads

This section contains all the files and utilities you'll need to get NFA 2005 running on your system.

NFA 2005 (version 0.92d, updated 2008-8-14)
The NFA 2005 core fileset, including the sim itself, as well as all helper files for generating player names and keeping records. Download this and unzip its contents to the directory of your choice, then open nfa2005.xls to begin league setup.

Fonts
The fonts that NFA 2005 uses. Unzip and install them for the best experience.

RAND() bugfix at microsoft.com
Excel 2003 users should visit this page to make sure they are fully patched to avoid encountering critical errors when using NFA 2005.

RAND() bugfix standalone
If you know you need the Excel 2003 random number fix, you can download and apply the patch directly from this link.

Screenshots

Screenshots
The Main screen, where you can get the news, scores, and schedule for the day. The current game is previewed in a "tale-of-the-tape"-style matchup window. It looks like Milwaukee is about to trounce Tampa Bay in a Friday night game.

The Player Stats screen, where you can analyze hundreds of statistics for each player, including streaks, totals, per-game averages, and projections. Stats are kept for both regular season games and playoff games. Travis Ellis is among the league leaders in points, despite missing over a quarter of the season due to injury.

The Calendar screen, where you can keep track of your favorite team's games throughout the season. Although they've been red-hot for most of the season, New Jersey is under .500 in March.

The Box Score screen, where the results of the games appear if you're watching them one-by-one. Baltimore edged Toronto in a hard-fought defensive stuggle.

The Options screen, where a number of general presentation options can be set. There's also the name tables, which let you change conference and division names as well as all team data at any time. You can also have NFA 2005 automatically generate HTML files so you can post a virtual sports page based on the current status of your league.

The Offseason Report screen. Here you can select a team and view the personnel moves that it made during the previous offseason. The summary area grades teams based on the improvement (or lack thereof) they made, although the rankings are simply educated guesses.