Deal or No Deal – Download and Play the Popular TV Game Show in Excel

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Deal or No Deal Logo - Popular TV Show Excel SimulationEver since we moved to Seattle we have been watching TV game show – Deal or No Deal (for lack of better things to do in the hotel) The game provides an interesting look at human nature and risk taking abilities. People who wouldn’t risk their retirement savings or jobs would go to these game shows and take risks to win all or nothing. It is fascinating to see how one makes judgment to accept an offer and take money or continue to play hoping to win even more.

Out of curiosity and my passion for simulating games, I have made a small excel file using which you can play the deal or no deal game. It is a reasonably good simulation of the game on the TV.

Download and play Deal or No Deal Game in Excel
(the file has no VBA or anything, so go ahead and be curious)

How to Play the Excel Deal or No Deal Game?

  • excel-deal-or-no-deal-game-simulationWhen you open the downloaded excel you will something like this.The green cells are editable and everything else is locked. Start the game by setting “accept offer?” to “No” and “Play game?” to “Yes”.

    If you would like to randomize the suitcase – value assignments, just set “Play game?” to “No” and excel shuffles the values for you. (How to shuffle a list of values in excel using formulas?)

  • Start selecting your suitcases one by one. After each pick, the latest offer is shown in the orange color box at the bottom. You can also see that picked suitcases and values already picked getting de-highlighted. See the below illustration:deal-or-no-deal-excel-games-how-to-play
  • Finally, when you like an offer, just say “accept offer” to see how much your suitcase had. Of course excel cannot pay you the money for the accepted offer. So just have a big smile and enjoy. 🙂
  • When you want to play again, just select the your suitcase picks (the green tabular area) and hit delete. Go back to first step.

Download the Excel Deal or No Deal Game

How the Excel simulation of Deal or No Deal game works?

  • Please note that I have protected the workbook so that you wont accidentally delete any formulas. Just unprotect the sheet (Menu > Tools > Protection > Unprotect Sheet) so that you can understand how the simulation works.
  • When you enter “Play Game” value as “No” the values assigned to suitcases are shuffled. How? The shuffling goes on whenever you press F9 or make some changes to the sheet until you change the “play game” to “yes”. The random shuffling formulas use circular reference, something like this: g10 = if(playgame="no", shuffled-suitcase-value,g10)
  • Whenever you pick a suitcase, the formulas check 2 things: (1) whether you have already picked that suitcase (2) whether your pick is same as the case assigned to you. If both conditions fail, then the formula would display the value assigned to that suitcase.
  • How the latest offer calculation works: As a game player our objective is to take an offer when the value is as close as possible to the expected value (total amounts remaining / total no. of suitcases remaining) at any point. In the TV show the latest offer is derived from expected value of your suitcase . I have used deal or no deal formula from here. This formula takes a random percentage between 20% and 95% of the expected value based on number of suitcases already picked.
  • Finally I have used conditional formatting to make the presentation better.

More posts on games & excel that you may enjoy:
Simulating Dice throws in Excel
Generate and Print Bingo / Housie tickets using this excel
Understanding Monopoly Board Game

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25 Responses to “Shift Calendar Template – FREE Download”

  1. Alvin says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    your recent postings include only Excel 2007 templates. Unfortunately the company I work at still runs Excel 2003. Is it possible to get your awesome files in other excel version as well?

    Thanks so much for your great excel stuff!

  2. Stelios Tserkezis says:

    Is it possible to do this for shifts with hours instead of days? To organise a three shift day?

    Thanks in advance,

    Stelios

  3. MASTHAN says:

    In my organization there are 45 employees i need split then into three shifts ex:A shift:14,B shift:14,C shift:14 and week off:3 kindly help me on this.

  4. Hui... says:

    @Masthan

    You need to understand what rules your company has for the various shifts / roster combinations

  5. Georges Lacombe says:

    Chandoo, I once did a shift control spreadsheet for my team. I put one person in each line, the columns were the days. I put a shift code in each cell indicating in which shift that person should work, or if the person were out that day. I have two codes for being out. One is for vacations and one is to compensate days worked in weekends. This way I was able to count how many persons I have in each shift, how many were on vacations and how many were out compensating (that's the term we use here) weekend worked hours.
    Later I included the possibility of a person be in two lines one for normal hours other for overtime. This is mainly used for planning purposes. If you would like I can send you an example. The only problem of this spreadsheet is that we don't have a person view, only this consolidated view.

    • Chuck Vaughan says:

      Hi George, I would like to have a copy of your spreadsheet if you can share it.
       
      Thanks in advance, Chuck   

  6. Idan says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    Where is the code located ? is it VBA ? If so , how do you hide it ? Or it is .NET ?

    Thx

  7. Hui... says:

    @Idan
    .
    No VBA or code, it is all done with Mirrors.
    Only Joking,
    .
    But there is no VBA or code,
    It is all done with Named Formulas and Lookups.
    Have alook at the cells in the calander area and Named Formulas in the Formulas, Name Manager Tab.

  8. Anand Sant says:

    How can i calculate between two or more different workbooks? Please, reply me as early as possible.

    • Hui... says:

      @Anand
      Open the workbooks you want to link to
      Start a formula = and click and change between workbooks as required.
      You can use the View, Switch window menu to change workbooks mid formula

      The format for using workbooks is
      =[Workbook.xlsm]Sheet1!$A$1
      or
      =SUM('[Book2.xls]Sheet1'!$A$1:$D$10)
      etc

  9. Shemi says:

    Hi Chandoo,
    I am working with a call centre wherein i ned to update at the month end 20 to 30 employees login hours which are defict to track it at the month end is very difficult is there any template which can be made to track that why on a particular day a guy who needs to be on calls was why not on calls.

  10. Denice Lognshaw says:

    Thank you so much Chandoo. This is really helping me. As usual, you rock.

  11. Mukesh Verma says:

    What's FortyTwoDays and Calendar in Name manager?

    Both are unused and FortyTwoDays doesn't make any sense.

  12. Dave says:

    I have a SQL db that contains records of events scheduled/completed on a particular date. Can this method ous building a calendar be used to display those events on the respective day?

  13. Jan Halliday says:

    Positively awesome!
    I'm attempting to help a friend create a schedule for adult classes - and of course its not"paid help".  Here is the scenario:
    20 classes, instructor, room#, student class size, start date, number of class days (need to subtract weekends)

    class
    instructor
    room
    students
    start
    #days

    PATH
    karen
    201
    21
    01/01/13
    11

    BILLING
    jane
    401
    15
    01/12/13
    13

    MEDISOFT
    mike
    301
    11
    01/25/13
    9

    he'd like to see these classes show up in different colors within the same month's calendar chart.  He can draw it, but I'd like to see it done automatically through data, and I just can't visualize it, but I KNOW this will work - can you help?
    Jan 🙂
     

  14. Chan Tean says:

    Dear chandoo,

    Try many way to download still can't access. Any way we want to try out 3 shifts with 3 guys in a group .eg Group A Morn, Group B Night and Group C Rest. And every each group must work on sunday to take turns. In fact we are security teams so that's why sunday is required to work. Pls guide and show how to put in the working calendar. Thank you in advance.

  15. Veronica Burggren says:

    I've been trying to copy and/or recreate this to use in a workbook I'm doing for the transportation department I'm working for. I need to have the calendar on the first sheet in my document (it has graph's from data on another sheet). I'm trying to use it to track (with the conditional formatting) accidents and injuries. I've redone the conditional formatting to do 4 different accident types (no injury, near miss, OSHA recordable injury and work loss injury), but when I enter the formula's you have in the calendar portion where it says "DateOfFirst-FirstWeekDay" I can't figure out how you did that. Are you able to help?

  16. Pipin Fantom says:

    I would like to use Excel to solve the following problem for a community work. I want to create a Driver schedule for a given month from a pool of volunteers for a community service. Each of these volunteers can drive only on specific days in a week. I would like to populate the driving schedule for each weekday with primary, secondary and tertiary drivers in a random fashion so that I do not overburden one person. I would greatly any help you can provide.

  17. Ravichandra says:

    Hi chandoo,
    Thanks for your valuable effort for create this template and let me know how to add multiple employees in the the Roaster.

  18. Savitha says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    This article on shift roaster is very helpful. Could you please let me know how i can use the same for n number of resources who work 24/7, considering their leaves and holidays?

    Thanks,
    Savitha

  19. Balu says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    This article on shift roaster is very helpful to all. Could you please let me know how i can use the same if I want to add for some more shifts, since the color is not getting change if I add more shifts like 4,5 etc.,

    Thanks,
    Murali

  20. Sarah says:

    How can I change the date to 2017 under Shift Data worksheet.

  21. Cad says:

    solution 1:
    mydata=B2:C16
    stoplist=E2:E8

    =LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16, F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*F))

    =LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16,RH,N(B2:B16=B2), F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),TOT,SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*RH*F),SUM(SMR*RH)-SUM(SMR* RH*F))

    ALTERNATE SOLUTION
    =SUM(C2:C16)-SUM(FILTER(C2:C16,ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))))

    =SUM((B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16))-SUM((ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))*(B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16)))

  22. Cad says:

    let
    Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table1"]}[Content],
    #"Replaced Value" = Table.ReplaceValue(Source,null,";",Replacer.ReplaceValue,{"Column1"}),
    #"Transposed Table" = Table.Transpose(#"Replaced Value"),
    #"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Transposed Table",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"}),
    #"Merged Columns" = Table.CombineColumns(#"Removed Other Columns",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"},Combiner.CombineTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.None),"Merged"),
    #"Split Column by Delimiter" = Table.ExpandListColumn(Table.TransformColumns(#"Merged Columns", {{"Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(";", QuoteStyle.Csv), let itemType = (type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true] in type {itemType}}}), "Merged"),
    #"Added Prefix" = Table.TransformColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter", {{"Merged", each "|" & _, type text}}),
    #"Replaced Value1" = Table.ReplaceValue(#"Added Prefix","||","|",Replacer.ReplaceText,{"Merged"}),
    #"Split Column by Delimiter1" = Table.SplitColumn(#"Replaced Value1", "Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.Csv), {"Merged.1", "Merged.2", "Merged.3", "Merged.4", "Merged.5", "Merged.6", "Merged.7", "Merged.8"}),
    #"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter1",{"Merged.1"}),
    #"Removed Duplicates" = Table.Distinct(#"Removed Columns")
    in
    #"Removed Duplicates"

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