Excel PowerBall Lottery Ticket Checker Spreadsheet
Checking Lottery Picks = Painful
With the new trend of ginormous lottery jackpots, there seem to be more and more groups of people coming together to purchase as many tickets as possible. Going through and manually checking the numbers can be quite a pain and there is a high possibility you might miss a winning combination.
With this Excel-powered spreadsheet, you can type in all your lottery ticket picks and automatically get fed winning numbers once the lottery balls have been picked. I’ll provide a little bit of how the spreadsheet is setup and then you can download this Excel file for free and use it to analyze the next time your office pulls together $500 bucks for a chance at living the good life.
The PowerBall Dashboard
Let’s tackle the cool part first. The dashboard is where you’ll go to see if you had any winning tickets. There are three sections containing user inputs:
- Enter the Jackpot amount
- Add the PowerBall lottery numbers that were picked the night of the drawing
- Select the Power Play Multiplier from the drop down menu
Once you have entered the winning numbers, you will instantly see if you have won any money (hopefully, it is more than $8…)
Enter Your Purchased Tickets
Unfortunately, there is no way that I could dream up that would get Excel to scan all your lottery numbers and load them into this model. So this is where some dreaded manual work comes into play.
You can enter in all your numbers into the table (order doesn’t matter except for the PowerBall number needs to be in the PowerBall column). Make sure that all your data is within the table indicator, designated by the tiny blue right-angle icon in the bottom right-hand corner (shown in the screenshot below). That way the lottery dashboard and all the formulas will pick up your entire data set.
Power Play Multiplier [Optional]
Some people like to pay an extra $1 to the lottery ticket price and gain the Power Play Multiplier. This allows you to multiply your winnings by a specific amount. If you have tickets that include the Power Play option, simply select ‘Yes’ in the drop down menu within the Power Play table column.
What Are The Odds?
Within the Excel Spreadsheet, I also have a worksheet dedicated to showing you just how bad your odds are. Also, within the table are the payout combinations.
You can see that the payout really isn’t that much until you start matching 5 out of the 6 numbers.
I use this table in the spreadsheet to lookup the payouts while calculating the winnings. So if for some reason down the road the payouts change, you can just update the table amounts and keep on using this nifty spreadsheet tracker.
Error Prevention
While building any sort of model (even if it’s just for fun), you should always build in measures to prevent user errors. I have used a couple of Excel’s native features to prevent data input errors while building this spreadsheet.
- Conditional Formatting – To display duplicate values within a row. You may only have 6 unique numbers to make up your picks
- Data Validation – To ensure your numbers are within the range of possibility. As of this writing, the 5 normal picks can be a number from 1 to 69. The PowerBall number can be any number between 1 and 26.
- Password Protection – I went ahead and password protected the PowerBall Lottery Calculator’s dashboard to prevent accidents. There is no password to unlock the spreadsheet, you simply just need to click on the Remove Protection button within the Review Ribbon Tab.
Download the PowerBall Ticket Checker Spreadsheet
If you want to download this PowerBall Lottery ticket checker spreadsheet (fully unlocked), feel free to directly download the spreadsheet by clicking the download button below.
Have You Ever Won?
I would love to see if any visitors have actually won the lottery! How much did you win? What did you spend it on? Let me know your lottery story in the comments section below.
I look forward to reading your lottery experience 🙂
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Chris Newman
Chris is a finance professional and Excel MVP recognized by Microsoft since 2016. With his expertise, he founded TheSpreadsheetGuru blog to help fellow Excel users, where he shares his vast creative solutions & expertise. In addition, he has developed over 7 widely-used Excel Add-ins that have been embraced by individuals and companies worldwide.