SubscribeBingo / Housie Ticket Generator in Excel
I am fascinated by board games. They provide immense fun, anyone can enjoy them, they are unpredictable and best of all they are great value for money. That is why whenever I get sometime I experiment with simulating games to know them better [read Why Monopoly board game is not as random as it appears]. So, out of curiosity I have created an excel sheet that can generate bingo / housie (housey) tickets – 24 of them at a time. To get new set of tickets you would hit F9 (recalculate).
Download Housie ticket maker excel sheet
Note that these are Bingo UK / India / Australia variant I am talking about, not the US 5*5 type of bingo tickets.
Read on if you want to know how this is done:
According to Wikipedia:
A typical housie/bingo ticket .., contains fifteen numbers, arranged in nine columns by three rows. Each row contains five numbers and four blank spaces. Each column contains either one, two, or very rarely three, numbers:
* The first column contains numbers from 1 to 9,
* The second column numbers from 10 to 19,
* The third 20 to 29 and so on up until the last column, which contains numbers from 80 to 90.
I have removed number “90″ from the list in order to reduce some complexity in generating the tickets.
The problem is now to “generate 15 random number between 1 to 89 and fill them in 15 random spots in a grid of 3 rows by 9 columns such that each row has exactly 5 numbers”
Now I could write a function in VBA to do this, but I wanted to do this only using formulas. So I started breaking the problem.
The first challenge is to select any random 5 cells in a 9 cell row
Once we select any random 5 cells in a 9 cell row, we will fill them with bingo numbers. Now, excel has a function to generate random numbers between 1 to 9 (=round(rand()*9,0)), but this is not good for us since each time we call this function we will get a random number between 1 to 9, where as we need a 5 random numbers without repetition between 1 to 9. The function is memoryless and could repeat numbers when called 5 times.
Instead we can list all the possible “5 cells with numbers and others are empty” combinations of a 9 cells region and select a random combination every time. There are essentially 9C5 i.e. 126 ways in which you can select any 5 cells out of 9 cells (without repetition of course).
So I listed all these combinations in a table and then randomly selected one of the combinations. You can see the first five such combinations in the image below:
Selecting any five cells out of nine cells
Now I created a 3*9 region and filled the cells with 1s or 0s, “1″ when the cell in bingo ticket is supposed to have a value and “0″ if the cell is empty as shown below:
Next challenge is to show random values in each cell
The trick here is that first column in our 3*9 bingo ticket has any number(s) from 1 to 9, second column has any number(s) from 10 to 19 …
Again, the challenge is the numbers should not repeat, otherwise we could simply use rand()*10, rand()*10+10, rand()*10+20 ... to generate the numbers.
This time it gets even more trickier because each column can have either no values, or 1 value or 2 values or 3 values.
The ticket generation logic now looks like:
- If the column has no values in it, then we will leave all the cells in that column of bingo ticket empty
- If the column has 1 value, we will generate any random number from that column’s range of possible values (1-9, 10-19,20-29,…80-89) and place it in the cell that is supposed to have a value and leave other cells empty.
- If the column has 2 values, we will generate 2 random numbers without repetition from that column’s range of possible values and place them in cells that are supposed to have them
- If the column has 3 values, we will generate 3 random numbers without repetition from that column’s range of possible values and place them in cells that are supposed to have them
As you can see, it is easy when the column has no or 1 value in it. But when the column has 2 or 3 I used the combinations trick described earlier.
First I created all 2 number combinations and 3 number combinations. Since the numbers on Bingo ticket are always sorted from top to bottom in a column, I just had to list down 45 combinations (10C2) for 2 numbers and 120 combinations (10C3) for 3 numbers.
The rest of the details are small enough that I can leave them to your imagination. So when the ticket is generated, it looks like this:
Remember to download housie / bingo ticket generator excel sheet and print your tickets at home. Just F9 to generate new set of tickets. Un-hide the rows from 43 if you want to see how this is done.
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At Chandoo.org, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". This blog is started in 2007 and today has 350+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 
This is an awesome way to generate Housie Tickets. It’s tough to find these tickets in the US. Thanks!
Hi mate
thanks for this.. this is a lot of fun…
Thanks mate. This is a cool way of generating housie tickets……..
Thank you, great to see it working.
@All.. thanks everyone. I am happy you found this useful
Hi Chandoo,
I really liked your Housie Tickets. However, the tickets printed out are too small and I can’t seem to increase the size to the regular printed housie tickets. Can you help me out please? Thank You. Dina
@Dina: Welcome to PHD and thanks
hmm… I have tried to set the printing preferences to print 20 odd tickets per each A4 page. But if you are looking for bigger size here is how you can get:
1. Go to to print preview and adjust margins and scaling. Scale your sheet until the tickets fill up the print area.
2. print. You may want to repeat this few times so that you can get optimum size. Then save the workbook.
3. next time you need more tickets, just print.
Let me know if you face any difficulties.
Hi, Thanx a lot .. its very useful
hey i tried to download this zip but looks like the file is damaged can you help ?
@Ravi : You are welcome
@Madhu: Are you sure? I just tried to download and unzip it and it seems to work fine. Can you try again and let me know if you have troubles. It is a very small file, may be I can mail it to you.
Great…. Can i change colors
@Andre… sure you can. You may want to adjust colors from conditional formatting so that they are truly changed. Let me know if you have some trouble.
Thanks Chandoo once again for this great tool…….. very creative!
Thanx Chandoo .
Just could not find Housie Tickets here in Kenya .
Awesome Funda .
Cool & gr8
Hey…
This is cool.. We were planning for a potluck event where I wanted to host this game but was thinking if I should go and buy it from the store just for this one time.. so as usual google’d to see if there was any generator and your’s was the first hit… its cool and easy to print and I love it!!! Thanks a lot!!!
Sujatha: Thanks for your comments. Hope you had a memorable party.
Thanks for this excellent coding.
Please tell us how to change colors.
(sorry for a repeat post)
Sometimes 1, 2 or 3 columns go empty in some tickets. You might want to look into this.
Hi chandoo,
I also created my own bingo/housie ticket generator ;o)))
with all 90 numbers and with speeching draw ;o))
it’s another way to generate 15 random number between 1 to 90 and fill them in 3 boards of 15 random spots in a grid of 3 rows by 9 columns , 5 numbers by row
(45 numbers among 90 without duplicate)
formulas are in hidden rows (1 to 35)
here is my workbook
http://www.cijoint.fr/cjlink.php?file=cj200906/cijYEVgITv.zip
I also write other Excel stuff for fun at :
http://www.excelabo.net/search/node/jeux%20geedee
this URL belong to my good MVP friend (Misange)
The French Excel addict site !!!!
http://www.excelabo.net
cheers !!!
What happened to number 90???
@Modeste: Thanks for sharing your article..
@Jo.. “I have removed number “90? from the list in order to reduce some complexity in generating the tickets.” Generating 90 along with 80-89 creates a tricky problem of having 11 numbers in the last band while every other column has only 10 possible values.
May be you can take a look at the workbook formulas and help me generate the 90 as well by changing them…
If you want/need a 5 x 5 USA version…
My ‘Bingo Card Variety’ workbook does Bingo, Buzzword Bingo and Bible Bingo.
Free, download from… http://excelusergroup.org/media/
‘–
Jim Cone
Portland, Oregon USA
Hi Chandoo / Jim,
Thanks for the details and excellent tool.
I am working for a media company in India and based out of Mumbai. We want to generate huge number of bingo tickets in 5×5 version with 26 grids in one sheet and roughly 13 million such sheets.
Please let me know if either of you can help me on this.
Not sure if it can be done in XL or VBA .
This is very urgent and need your help.
You can call me on 91-9820614804.
Thanks & Rgds
Jai Daga
Jai Daga,
You need to get quotes from at least three commercial printers.
The volumes you are considering will be very attractive to anyone in the printing business.
‘–
Jim Cone
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the reply. I understand its good for printing business and lot of vendors are already approaching us.
Issue is of generating these 5*5 tickets and each ticket to have unique 8-10 digit identity code.
Basically below is the requirement
***********
Each sheet will have 26 tickets
Each ticket have 5*5 grid acc to the US 1-75 number system but with no free space
Each ticket has a unique 8-10 digit pin code
We plan to print 5 million sheets (each sheet having 26 tickets)
There will be 1.25 million sheets which will be unique and the balance sheets (3.75m) will have the same tickets
However pin code will be unique in each ticket and hence there will be 5*26=130million unique pin codes
These output needs to come on an excel or as a PDF file in the same format as the sheet
*************
Let me know if you can guide me of such software or program that can be used by me for ticket generation.
Thanks
Jai
Jai,
I might be able to generate the 130,000,000 serial numbers in an Excel workbook (.xls). Possibly Ten million numbers on each of thirteen worksheets.
It would have to be on a paid basis.
Contact me at…
james.coneXXX@comcast.netXXX (remove the XXX)
if you would like to discuss further.
Jim Cone
Portland, Oregon USA
Hi Chandoo, i have downloaded your housie ticket generator, just have one query, how many maximum unique tickets it can make ????
do help me with this,
Shyaamal
@Shyaamal I guess the ticket generator should be able to make obscenely high number of unique tickets. since the process is randomized, you might see same tickets twice…
Hello Chandoo,
Awesome tool! .. I loved it.
Is there a way to tweak the generator so that I only generates no more than 4 tickets a worksheet (Make it nice and clean to print)?
I want to print more than a 1000 of these tickets, so dont want to click on refresh button 250 times.. so if once I click refresh, is it possible to generate 50 or so worksheet at a time? So that I can click refresh 4 times and get my 1000 tickets?
Please let me know of your thoughts.
Thanks
Vir
@Vir.. Thank you.
you can easily modify the formulas and add a macro to do this. The file is unlocked, so feel free to make the changes..
There is an online generator at http://www.bingocardmaker.co.uk, which generates the numbers in blocks of 6 cards, where every number from 1-90 is used. This is how the UK style books are usually printed, so that if you buy 6 tickets you are sure to have every number once and only once. Makes the generation routine a little trickier.
Chandoo
Hey Thanks a lot ..
Im working on a merchant cargo vessel…
We are having a party tomorrow and needed this software badly..
Im sure it will be a big hit with the crew..
Thanks again
Chandu,
Downloaded yuo excel sheet and read people comments / remaks , Eve thing positive..
Please consider my feedback in positive way
Housie tickets I have seen has a basic Rule which is missing in you tickets
1) Numbes 1-90 – You have aleady mensioned So fine..
2) Take a six tickets in a Row – Numbers shall not Reaplete.
3) Each sheet will have 12 tickets
If you can work on your Excel fo fun of Indians stauing out side india appiciated…
thnks chandooooo, illeterate logo ke liye aisa esy way rakhane ke liye.
I need bingo teckets in excel with serial numbers can you help me please Tnks In Advance