Can Excel randomly pick one winner out of 100 contest entries?

[Guest]

I want to use Excel to randomly select a winner out of a lot of entries.
Is there a program in Excel that can randomly select a row out of XXX rows?

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

Maybe not exactly what you expected but one way would be to use this
technique, assume the entries are in A1:A500, in an adjacent cell (B1) put

=RAND()

copy down to B500, select both columns and do data>sort and sort by column
B. Now just pick the winner in A1.

Regards,

Peo Sjoblom

 

[Bernie Deitrick]

Bernard,

Put a column of formulas next to your entries

=RAND()

and then sort both the entries and the column with the formulas based on the formulas. The top
value in the first column would be your winner. Do the sort multiple times (select a number of
times before hand) if you want....

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP

 

[Guest]

Thank you.
Have a good day.

Maybe not exactly what you expected but one way would be to use this
technique, assume the entries are in A1:A500, in an adjacent cell (B1) put

=RAND()

copy down to B500, select both columns and do data>sort and sort by column
B. Now just pick the winner in A1.

Regards,

Peo Sjoblom

 

[Guest]

Thanks
Have a good day.

Bernard,

Put a column of formulas next to your entries

=RAND()

and then sort both the entries and the column with the formulas based on the formulas. The top
value in the first column would be your winner. Do the sort multiple times (select a number of
times before hand) if you want....

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP