Last week I have reviewed Google’s flu trends chart and told you why it is an awesome chart. This week, I am going to show you how such a chart can be constructed in Excel.
First let me show you what I am able to do in Excel:
(compare this with actual chart on Google)
How I made the flu-trends chart in excel?
- Data, Data, Data: Data plays an important role in complex charts like these. The source data is thankfully available for download from Google. Flu incidence data is available by week (Sunday to Saturday) for every week since 28th Sep, 2003. For each week the data if given for all regions in various columns. But I was not able to use the data “as-is” to construct this chart. I had to massage and rearrange it a bit.
- The main issues is how flu season is classified (it starts on July and ends in June) and how the data is (we got weekly flu incident data, starting from Sunday to Saturday). The main issue here is each year, the weeks start on different dates. For eg. first Sunday in 2010 was on 3rd Jan where as in 2009 it was on 4th Jan. I tried using WEEKNUM() formula (examples), but it didn’t work well with the flu season (Jul to Jun). So I did some basic date math and ended up mapping weeks uniformly across years.
- The next issue is taking one big table of data with dates in rows and regions in columns and transform it to weeks in rows, years and columns and actual flu data for the selected region in the cells.
- Then I set up 2 cells, one where user would specify “region” and other where a comparison “year” can be selected. I have used data validation to control the valid inputs.
- I used the MATCH, INDEX formulas to fetch corresponding weekly values for all years for selected region. Thanks to MATCH, INDEX and HLOOKUP formulas, this is not such a big task either. And if the optional comparison year is specified, we repeat that years values in another column. Otherwise that column is NA().
- Using these columns, I made a line chart. Then I cleaned up the chart and formatted the 2009-2010 series in thick blue and rest all in thin light blues. The optional comparison series was colored in red (for contrast). [related: line chart examples]
- The only remaining piece is to show the heat map of flu intensities below the chart. For this I have used the very useful 3 color scale conditional formatting setting in Excel 2007. (of course, I had to setup some extra calculations so that the intensities are normalized across the region / years and change when user selects a new region, but you already guessed it.)
- I choose to drop the colorful legend as it adds little value.
- The rest is some formatting and presentation.
What I learned from this experience?
- When I looked at Google’s chart, I doubted if it can be created in Excel. But I was wrong. It can be done in excel, and it takes no more than 2 hours.
- Data and structure of it play extremely important role in any visualization.We should understand the data and know how to arrange / transform / massage it, to make better charts.
- Date formulas are a flu in the nose.
- Excel 2007 conditional formatting is just awesome. [more examples]
- INDEX, MATCH, LOOKUP formulas are very powerful. I *respect* them. [here is a tutorial]
Download flu trends chart and play with it
Download the file (Excel 2007 only). The file is locked, but there is no password. Play with it and tell me if you like it.
Do you like this chart?
Have you done something similar in Excel? What was your experience like? Do you like this chart? How would you improve / change it?
More visualizations using Excel:
Olympic Medals by Country | Survey Results Dashboard | Test Cricket Statistics | Dynamic Charts
PS: After a looong time this post had many “I”s
PPS: Have a good weekend.
19 Responses to “How to Distribute Players Between Teams – Evenly”
An excellent solution, especially for large data sets.
Another solution without using solver would be to assign the player with the highest score to Team 1, the 2nd to team 2, 3rd to team 3, 4th to team 3, 5th to team 2, 6th to team 1, 7th to team 1 and it continues. This method would end up with a Std Dev of 0.001247219. This works best with a distribution with lower Std Dev for the dataset.
Full Disclosure: this is not my idea, remember reading something a few years ago. Think it may have been Ozgrid
thinking back I now remember why I read about it. About 10 years back I had to distribute around 300 team members into 25-30 odd teams. Used this method based on their performance scores. I used the method I described to do this and the distribution was pretty fair.
Solver would have saved me a ton of time though 🙂
I think the issue with you first Solver approach was that you took the absolute value of the sum of team deviations (which should always be zero except for rounding) instead of the sum of the absolute values (which is a reasonable measure of how unbalanced the teams are).
Here's another simple algorithm you could use: you start from the top (with players sorted from high to low), and at each step allocate the next player to whichever team has the smallest total so far. You can implement it dynamically with some formulas so it will update automatically when the data changes.
If the scores were more widely distributed (so that this might end up with not all teams the same size), you could add a constraint to only pick among the teams which currently have fewest players at each step, or just stop adding to any team when it hits its quota.
When I tried it on the sample, I got the three teams below, with a STDEV of 0.000942809 (i.e. about half of what Solver got to).
Team 1: John, Hugo, Tom, Josh, Eric, Zane, Charles, Andrew
Team 2: Barry, Michael, Kenny, Joe, Xavier, Patrick, Oliver, William
Team 3: Henry, Steven, Ben, Frank, Kyle, Edward, Cameron, Lachlan
Thanks for sharing!
Hi,
I was looking at all the solutions and this is closest to what I intended to do. I am dividing a bunch of players into 3 soccer teams. Players availability is also a factor while deciding the teams.
So the steps the excel needs to do is as follows:
1) In availability column if "yes" go to next
2) Equally divide 'Goalkeepers', 'Strikers', 'Defenders' basis their quality
So the end result gives each 3 teams a balance of players playing at different positions.
Can this be done on Google spreadsheet with only availability as an input from the user and rest calculates by itself.
Sorry for asking such a pointed question, but I have been struggling to find a solution for it for sometime now!
Hi Ishaan,
I am working on a similar problem at the moment, so I am wondering if you ever found a solution and if you are willing to share what you did.
Hi everyone, this is a variation of the famous Knapsack Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem.
I had to use a VBA implementation recently as part of a problem, where we ar trying to allocate teams of an organization into different locations (we are a large company with many different team). The goal was to optimally allocate teams to individual buildings without putting too many teams into one building and not splitting teams apart.
As we had around 400 teams of different sizes, solver couldn't handle it anymore. Luckily there is a Knapsack algorithm implementation in VBA readily available on the internet :).
I also went with a heuristic approach first!
An interesting mathematical solution but what if Eric and Xavier can't stand each other or Patrick is best friends with Steven - the real life problems that effect "even" teams.
@Joe
You can add more criteria like
If Eric and Xavier can't stand each other
=OR(AND(E15=1,E16=1),AND(F15=1,F16=1),AND(G15=1,G16=1))
It must be False
If Patrick is best friends with Steven
=OR(AND(E5=1,E17=1),AND(F5=1,F17=1),AND(G5=1,G17=1))
It must be True
Note that the 2 formulas above are exactly the same
except for the ranges
One must be True = Friends
One must be False = Not Friends
Nice Post!
Just one question What if number of players are not even or equally divisible.
Nice post Hui!
I download your workbook and just try to change in options the Precision Restriction from 10E-6 to 10-8 and the Convergence from 10E-4 to 10E-10. The process take almost the same time, but the results was great.
The standard deviation I got was 0,000471.
Team 1: John, Tom, Kenny, Frank, Eric, Xavier, Edward, Zane
Team 2: Steven, Hugo, Ben, Joe, Josh, Oliver, Cameron, William
Team 3: Barry, Henry, Michael, Kyle, Patrick, Charles, Andrew, Lachlan
Great application of Solver! Thanks for the link!
Great explanation. Well done... However, I tried with 6 teams of 4 players and solver never did finish.
How about vba code for the same data set.
I have 3 column A B C wherein A has text and B has number Wherein C is blank. And in C1 been the header C2 where I want the name to come evenly distributed the number which is in Column B.
My Lastcolumn is 1000.
Sorry if I'm being slow here, but how is 'Team Score' calculated? I've gone through the explanation several times but it seems to just appear.
@Hrmft
This process uses the Solver Excel addin
Solver is effectively taking the model and trying different solutions until it gets a solution that meets all the criteria
Then solver puts the solution into the cell and moves to the next cell
So yes it appears to "just appear"
Hi ! Thank you so much ! Works great 🙂
I cannot get the fourth Equation to work in my excel spreadsheet
You have =($E$2:$G$25=0)+($E$2:$G$25=1)=1 as a SUMIF solution, I have, =($F$2:$H$13=0)+($F$2:$H$13=1)=1 as my solution but it does not work. The only thing I changed is the ranges. Any suggestions?
Thank you.
Jim
I cannot get the fourth Equation of TURE or FALSE statements to work in my excel spreadsheet You have =($E$2:$G$25=0)+($E$2:$G$25=1)=1 as a SUMIF solution, I have, =($F$2:$H$13=0)+($F$2:$H$13=1)=1 as my solution but it does not work. The only thing I changed is the ranges. Any suggestions?
Sorry I left some of it out in the previous question,
Thank you. Jim