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What are the odds like for the UK General Election?

The UK general election is almost upon us and it’s a tight race! It’s the most unpredictable election in memory and has already produced some lively debates and political speed-dating as potential alliances are considered.

There are so many sources from which to gain the latest on likely election winners, and one such are the bookies. There are some great websites with up to the minute odds on all the political parties and it got us thinking wouldn’t it be great to capture and analyse this information in Excel….

After several cups of coffee and Excel wizardry one of our Excel trainers has created a rough but working Excel 2015 UK General Election spreadsheet.  You can download the spreadsheet here.

What it does:
  • Automatically updates with latest betting odds every hour (you can refresh at any time)
  • View a chart to analyse the betting odds
What you can do:
  • By having the latest data you have the ability to create more charts to your heart’s content!
  • Capture the live data so that you can view it historically. How did the odds change over the week? Which party gained/lost the most (from an odds perspective!).
  • With a bit of VBA pokery you could even create lookup reports focussing on specific parties.

There is a lot of opinion out there on the general election but you could do worse than follow the signals of those who are putting their money where their mouth is!

Learn more:

If you would like to learn more about how we produced this spreadsheet; you may wish to track other live web data like stocks, competitor pricing and more, then just click here.

Acknowledgements and useful resources

http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/most-seats

Election 2015: Poll tracker

http://www.ft.com/indepth/uk-general-election

Betting odds explained

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