Bowrap is a program for recording the results of bowls teams.

It was designed for the sport of Crown Green Bowls, although it may also be suitable for Lawn Bowls and indoor teams. It is aimed at teams playing in leagues.

Look at the notice board in any bowls hut and you will see a variety of charts recording how the teams have been doing. Typically, people draw a grid and record each match in a new column. There are various efforts to calculate players’ averages as the season progresses, but it all tends to get a bit fiddly and mistakes often creep in.

Now that many bowlers have a PC, they have tried to use them to help solve the problem (that’s what computers are supposed to be for). This is a natural application for a spreadsheet, and modern ones (like Excel) can be used to produce a very neat summary, with all the data recalculated as you go along. There are a couple of snags though:

• Excel is a powerful and complicated program. Getting a good display involves using some fairly advanced features. Even then, there’s a lot of the program you’re not using, which gets in the way.
• Excel is not always installed on home PCs, and it’s not cheap.

Bowrap is the solution to the problem.

It is designed to do one job: to look after the results of bowls teams. It is simple and cheap. It will run on any computer with Windows 95 or later. It has been tested on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, XP and Vista.