Is Excel acting slow & taking ages? As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel by formatting & charting better. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook.
No matter how much data you got, how many formulas you wrote, the end users seldom see them on your workbook. They see the finalized dashboard, they play with the model, they look at the report. And if you make poor choices, your end users will thing your workbook is slow.
7 Charting & Formatting Tips to Optimize & Speed up Excel
1. Use picture links / camera snapshots wisely
Picture links (known as camera snapshots in Excel 2003 or earlier) are a blessing in disguise. They can let you create stunning dashboards & reports, but they can also drastically slow-down your workbook. If you add one too many picture links or make they too dynamic, any time you change something on the dashboard, the picture links must be refreshed and that slows Excel down.
Remedy? Simple, use fewer picture links. Limit dynamic changes to minimum. Try using charts instead of picture links and measure the performance. If you have added any animation (thru VBA), get rid off it.
Note: In Excel 2010, the performance of picture links has been improved, but they still slow-down your workbook.
Resources to learn more about dynamic charts & picture links:
- Introduction to picture links – what are they and how to use them?
- Picture links in action – Cricket Worldcup Dashboard
- Excel Dynamic Charts – lots of examples, tutorials & downloads
2. Do not load too much data in to the charts
Any time you have a chart that depicts more than half-a-dozen series of data, stop and reject the idea. See if you can re-structure the chart so that it shows lesser information or becomes 2 charts. Some ground rules I follow,
- Never make charts with too many data points.
- Use form controls or user input to show a sub-set of data instead of everything.
- Do not customize the charts too much. Instead rely on other techniques like,
- Using drawing shapes & text-boxes.
- Using multiple charts
- Using a mix of charts & cell formatting
- Group the data and visualize at the group level (works for pivot tables)
Resources to learn about charting better:
- Which chart to use? a detailed guide
- Using form controls to make dynamic charts – examples
- Using text boxes in charts
- Panel charts – what are they and how to use them in Excel?
- Grouping data in pivot tables
3. Stay away from fancy formatting in the charts
Fancy chart formatting options like 3d, shadows, perspective, reflection or gradients are CPU intensive and eye-sore. Even if your chart is rendered in a split second, because of all the additional detail in it, user takes more time to read it and hence perceives your workbook as slow.
Solution? Just use simple formatting. Use these guidelines,
- Use fewer colors
- Use fewer fonts (maximum 2 for a chart for best results)
- Use 2d instead of 3d.
- Stay away from features like 3d, perspective, shadows, reflections in the chart formatting.
- If you must use these features, use them on a drawing shape and position it behind the chart.
Resource to learn about chart formatting:
- Chart formatting principles & best practices
- Using drawing shapes to enhance chart formatting
- 6 Excel charts you see in hell
- What colors to use in Excel charts?
4. Use conditional formatting, in-cell charts instead of charts
With Excel 2007 & 2010, you can create rich conditional formatting that communicates better. So use it instead of charts in some places. Some excellent uses of conditional formatting are,
- Use CF icons as alerts in dashboards
- Use in-cell charts – examples, tutorials & downloads
- Use CF to generate heat-maps – Example
5. Only format the cells you use
Often we format an entire column or row when we just use a bunch of cells. This used to be fine until Excel 2003 (where the maximum rows are 67k & max columns are 256). With Excel 2007 & 2010, the number of rows & columns in Excel worksheets has gone up significantly. So when you format an entire column you are asking for trouble. Follow below guidelines when formatting your worksheets to improve the performance.
- Use tables when you are dealing with structured data. This way all the formatting is done automatically and extends only up to the last row / last column.
- Never format an entire column or row. Just select the cells you use and format them.
- Use simple formats. This way, even if you have to apply them to additional rows, you can do so faster.
- Do not apply conditional formatting to very large ranges. This can significantly slowdown your workbook.
- Hide rows & columns you do not need. This way the temptation to mess with them is gone.
- Remove worksheets that are not required.
- Use minimal formatting for non-output worksheets. And hide them if possible.
- If you want to use very fancy formatting for a cell (multiple colors, multiple fonts etc.) use a text box instead. This way you can format it richer and the workbook remains lighter.
Related: 10 tips to create better & boss-proof Excel workbooks
6. Limit cell styles to a minimum
I have not tested this, but I heard that when you use a lot of cell styles, the workbook becomes slower. So rely on fewer cell styles and use only the built-in styles.
7. Use built-in features instead of 3rd party add-ins
I have nothing against add-ins and I personally use a few to do my work better. But when it comes to charting & formatting, you may want to use whatever is available if speed matters to you most. This is because built-in charts & features tend to be faster & bug-free. Plus they work on all computers.
If you must use 3rd party add-ins, use the ones made by a credible source & thoroughly test them. (Example: Jon’s charting add-ins, add-ins by other MVPs are usually better compared to a random macro code / add-in you found on internet).
More on Excel Optimization & Speeding up:
Read these articles too,
- Optimization & Speeding-up Tips for Excel Formulas
- Optimizing & Speeding-up VBA Macros
- Excel Optimization tips by Experts
- Excel Optimization tips submitted by our readers
What formatting & charting tips you suggest to speed up Excel?
Most of my work involves producing dashboards & worksheet models – where charts & formatting plays a big role. So I follow pretty much all these tips to make my workbooks responsive.
What about you? What tips you suggest to make Excel faster? How do you format your workbooks & charts so that they look good & act fast? Please share using comments.
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