excel question

[Anubis]

hey im wounderin if there is a way to have a list of names in one colom and then assign a random number to each name. randomly assign a random number to each person somethin like that. is this possible in excel. if its not anyone know of a program that will do it??

 

[thawolfman]

=RAND()

That works but it's only between 0 and 1

 

[Anubis]

no i need something that goes up to like 300 or so numbers

 

[thawolfman]

Any Better?

 

[kranky]

You could use something like =TRUNC(RAND()*300+0.5) which would generate random numbers up to 300, but the hard part would be to make sure you don't have any duplicates (I assume that matters).

 

[Anubis]

yea that helps but i need something that wont repeat numbers. every number can only be used once

 

[Anubis]

still need some help

 

[ErmanC]

If I understand you correctly, you're wanting to assign each name a unique random number. You could use like all the integers in between 0 and 300 or all the 7th numbers in between 10000 and 100000 or something crazy. It really doesn't matter what you use as long as it is a list of 300 unique numbers. So you make a dummy column containing the unique numbers you want to use in order that they occur (however you choose to create them). For this example use integers 0 through 300, in the column next to it you generate a random decimal number between 0 and 1 for each row. You then sort both columns based on the random decimal numbers you created. That way you've got a list of 300 unique numbers and you've used the random decimal numbers to sort them into a totally random order. You just paste that randomized list of seed numbers in front of your names column and that's it. Did I understand you correctly? Will this work?

 

[Anubis]

that could be right but i dont compleatly understand what you mean