This is a guest post by Vijay, our in-house VBA Expert.
There are times when we are entering dates into several columns and would like to select a date from a popup calendar instead of manually typing.
Today, lets understand how we can set up a pop-up calendar in Excel so that your users can easily input dates by right clicking on a cell and inserting a date.
Keep in mind:
1. This code is only supported on the 32-Bit versions of Excel.
2. You need to have admin rights to be able to install the ActiveX Control
First, take a look at pop-up calendar
Here is a short demo of how our pop-up calendar behaves.
What we need to do this
1. Design user form that contains our calendar.
2. Create a Data Table
3. Put some VBA code to get this done
Design user form that contains our calendar.
First let’s design the user form, so start up Excel and bring up the Visual Basic editor and add an user form in the project.
We would need the Microsoft Date and Time Picker control for this project, so please ensure that you have the required file available on your system. If it is not available you may download the MSCOMCT2.OCX from this link.
http://activex.microsoft.com/controls/vb6/mscomct2.cab
Installing this file is pretty simple, you need to extract the contents form the CAB file and then copy this into your System32 folder and then register using the REGSVR32 utility.
If you are using Windows 7 or above you would need to copy this file into the SysWOW64 folder and then register.
For Windows 7 and above, please make sure you are running the Command Prompt (Admin) to be able to successfully register the ActiveX control.
Windows 7: Click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt (right click and choose Run as Administrator
Windows 8: Windows Key + X, then choose Command Prompt (Admin)
Okay, let’s get back to designing the user form.
Insert a new Userfrom on the VBA project and then click on Addition Controls on the Tools menu.
Once the Additional controls dialog box is on the screen, locate the above highlighted entry and then select the same by clicking the box on the left. Now click Ok to close this dialog box.
Now place one Monthview control on the userform and one Command button.
Below are the properties that we need to change for the Commandbutton
• Caption = “Close”
• Cancel = True
• Name = cmdClose
Place this command button anywhere you like on the userfrom, we will place the Monthview on top of this to avoid show this to the user.
Since we have specified the Cancel = True for the commandbutton, the click event can be triggered by pressing the Escape key to handle the code that we will write for the Close button.
Now place the Monthview control as show in the picture below
We are done designing the Userform, now we need to write the code to handle the events.
Below is the code
Close Button
Private Sub cmdClose_Click()
Unload Me
End Sub
Userfrom
Private Sub UserForm_Initialize()
'matching the date in the calendar with the date of the active cell
'if there is a date,
If IsDate(ActiveCell.Value) Then
Me.MonthView1.Value = ActiveCell.Value
Else
Me.MonthView1.Value = Now
End If
End Sub
Private Sub MonthView1_DateClick(ByVal DateClicked As Date)
On Error Resume Next
Dim cell As Object
For Each cell In Selection.Cells
cell.Value = DateClicked
Next cell
Unload Me
End Sub
What the above code does?
1. The close button code will simply unload the userform and take it off the screen.
2. The userform initialize event code will check if the current cell on which we are right clicking the mouse contains any date, if there is a date then it will set the date on the calendar as the one on the cell, otherwise it will show today’s date.
3. The dateclick event of the Monthview control occurs when we click on any date, this code is responsible for populating the cell with the date we have selected. If there are multiple cells selected the code will populate all of them with the date selected.
Adding the context menu option
Now comes the interesting part of adding the context menu option, one thing I would like to specify here as the name suggests “Context menu” these options change depending on what and where we are right clicking the mouse. You will see a different context menu when you right click on a cell, table, shape etc. as shown in the example below
Since every object has a different type of context menu associated we need to make site we are adding our option to the right place.
I would recommend reading this article to know more about the types of commandbars available and how to use them. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa141001(v=office.10).aspx
Also this link provides a list of available names http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/525939-visual-basic-applications-list-available-commandbars-excel-2010-a.html
We wanted to add the right click context option to a data table which is called as “List Range Popup”.
Create a Data Table
Type the heading in Cells
B2 = ID
C2 = Start Date
D2 = End Date
E2 = Name
Now click on cell B2, and press CTRL + T shortcut from the keyboard. Make sure to select the option My Table has headers and then click Ok.
We would need the add the below code to the Open event of our workbook so that this option is available to us every time we need to work here.
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
On Error Resume Next
Dim NewControl As CommandBarControl
Application.OnKey "+^{C}", "Module1.OpenCalendar"
Application.CommandBars("List Range Popup").Controls("Insert Date").Delete
Set NewControl = Application.CommandBars("List Range Popup").Controls.Add(Before:=1)
With NewControl
.Caption = "Insert Date"
.OnAction = "Module1.OpenCalendar"
.BeginGroup = True
End With
End Sub
We have also assigned a shortcut key of CTRL + SHIFT + C to this, for those who love to work more using the keyboard.
The above code will add the “Insert Date” context menu option to our data table(s) in the active workbook whenever we open this file.
Next is cleanup
We need to make sure that the context menu we have added is also removed when the file is close, the below code will do that for us.
Private Sub Workbook_BeforeClose(Cancel As Boolean)
On Error Resume Next
Application.OnKey "+^{C}"
Application.CommandBars("List Range Popup").Controls("Insert Date").Delete
End Sub
Note: I have seen the project code left over in the VBA project explorer even after we have close this file, and did some research on the same. The common reason for this is having some COM addins installed. Please share if you also run into this issue and if you were able to find any other reasons or ways to eliminate this issue.
Download Demo File
Click here to download the demo file & use it to understand this technique.
What about you? Do you use them often? Please share your experiences, techniques & ideas using comments.
If you are new to VBA, Excel macros, go thru these links to learn more.
Join our VBA Classes
If you want to learn how to develop applications like these and more, please consider joining our VBA Classes. It is a step-by-step program designed to teach you all concepts of VBA so that you can automate & simplify your work.
Click here to learn more about VBA Classes & join us.
About Vijay
Vijay (many of you know him from VBA Classes), joined chandoo.org full-time this February. He will be writing more often on using VBA, data analysis on our blog. Also, Vijay will be helping us with consulting & training programs. You can email Vijay at sharma.vijay1 @ gmail.com. If you like this post, say thanks to Vijay.
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