Live soccer scores in presentations

Something completely different in this article. Humans like soccer and they follow their favorite club(s) and the rankings. Now you can display live soccer information like ranking and scores in real time in a data driven PowerPoint presentation. Some people run a kiosk system or display system to advertise their products and services. They add local news and sports information to get more attention. Many of those presentations are created as Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Now there are a few ways to update this hot sports information in your presentation. You can stop the running slide show, go to your page and edit the score and start the slide show again. But this is visible to the public via your screens. So this method is not really an option. There is a tool called DataPoint on the presentation market that allows you to set up a link to a data source and then DataPoint displays the information in real time on your screen without interrupting the slide show. You can manually feed your sports database but there is a better and automatic way that I want to show you. There are data providers out there that provide real time sports information and scores via XML data feeds. We tried out Xscores.com and tried to link their XML sport feeds to our presentations.

Get external data

Xscores.com is a company that features real time results for tennis, basketball, hockey, baseball and American football games. You can learn everything about the number of live games that are currently playing and when the next game starts. Xscores.com provides the fastest updates, livescores, keeps track of history results, offers detailed and updated information for all games, gives you the ability to have a personalized experience according to your preferences and interests and is the optimum way to stay updated! When you sign up with them you get your username and password to log in to your account and some documentation on how you read the data from their service. There are 2 types of calls; update calls for live data and structure calls to list countries, competitions, teams etc. If you want to retrieve the soccer matches of this week, you use the following URL: http://data2.xscores.com/exporter/?state=clientUpdate&usr=[username]&pwd=[password]&type=4&s=1. S 1 stands for soccer and type 4 stands for this week’s matches. When you execute this you get this returned by the live sports feed;

Set up connection

With DataPoint you can use that XML data stream and display a real time score board for a given game, or an overview of the ranking. Let me show you how you can display the score of a given match in PowerPoint with real time data. First make sure that DataPoint is installed on your computer with Microsoft PowerPoint. Click DataPoint in the PowerPoint menu.

Now click List in the group Connections.

Go to the XML node and click Add connection.

Now enter this URL http://data2.xscores.com/exporter/?state=clientUpdate&usr=[username]&pwd=[password]&type=10&s=1&mid=1062280. This URL will return match information of my chosen soccer club. Check out the Xscorer documentation for more information on the parameter options.

add xml url to add connection to the external xml data

Hit OK to close the form. Rename the connection into My Match.

add a data table to the xml connection to get data

Add queries to xml data tables

Now click the Add query button and select the Home table and click OK to close.

Rename the query to Home. Repeat these steps. Add a new query pointing to Away and name it Away.

Add another query now pointing to Result and name it Result to host the score.

Finally add another query to point to Card and name it Cards.

Your connection list should now looks like this;

overview of all xml tables we are using to display

Add a new text box to the first slide of presentation. Select DataPoint from the menu and then Text box of the Shapes group.

click text box in datapoint menu to set text box properties

Set the data connection to My Match | Home, set the column to name and leave to row number to 1. Hit OK to close and I have now linked the content of that data to this text box.

select row and number of the xml table to assign it to the text box

Add another text box to host its ranking position. Click DataPoint, Text box and set the data connection to My Match | Home and set the column to standing.

Now click the Texts tab and enter the word Pos at the prefix text. Now click OK and the text box will display the word Pos and then its current position in the ranking.

Repeat these 2 text boxes for the opposite. Do not use the Home query but here you can choose the Away query to host the opposite club. To display the score now, add a new text box and click DataPoint, Text box. Choose My Match | Result as data connection, and pick Value from the column list. Leave row number to 1. Click OK to close.

assign the current real-time score to the text box

Optionally, the user can add a table and link that table to the Cards list to display the green and red cards of this game.

Prepare for continuous slide show

Now, as a final action we want to make sure that the slide show will run continuously. Click Set Up Slide Show in the Slide Show menu and set the Show Type to Browsed at a kiosk and click OK to apply.

Now start your slide show and DataPoint will continuously read data from the sports data feed at Xscores and update the content in real time on your screens.