Have you ever wondered about applying different Spreadsheet Formats to reports which may be send to different people and so the styling may be different for each recipient? The Boss may get a Formal report where the Art department may get a Funky version of the same data?
No, Neither had I until recently when somebody asked me for just that:
Boss Style
Black & White Style
Funky Style
Blue Style
Of course using Conditional Formats you can highlight cells based on criteria, so why not extend that to the Whole Report Styling?
This tutorial will detail just that.
Lets get started
Download the Sample File (Excel 2013 & 2016 + only): Download Sample File
Firstly Identify your Report Area
In this case it is B8:E28
Note: The area above includes the header row, Row 8, but you can actually apply different CF’s to hat independently of the data area if you require
Make a list of Style Names
I have used four namely: Boss, Blue, Black & White and Funky.
Add an Id next to each from 1 to x in this case 4 as there are 4 entries
Convert the Table to a Table by selecting the area E2:F6
Goto Insert, Table
Add a Style Link cell
In a spare cell H2: add a formula like: =SUBTOTAL(4,Style[Id])
This will extract the Maximum value from the Table when the non-selected rows are hidden.
I have also Named the cell Style_Link
Add a Slicer
Select any cell in the Style Table and goto the Insert, Slicer menu
An Insert Slicers dialog pops up, Select Style
You will now have a Slicer linked to the Styles table
You can format the slicer as appropriate, Resize and Rename it if required
Apply Conditional Formats to the Report
Now select the report area and apply four Conditional Formats which will be styles according to the Useage
You normally only apply 3 styles as the default is already a style
Select B8:E28
Goto the Conditional Format, New Rule, Use a Formula menu
Apply the formula and format to suit your needs
Boss
This is my Default style when Style_Link = 1
Hence I don’t need to apply a specific style
Blue
This is my Conditional Format style when Style_Link = 2
Note: the formula used is =AND(B8<>””, Style_Link=2)
So the Conditional Format will only apply this to cells in the area with a value in them and when the Style_Link cell = 2
Black & White
This is my Conditional Format style when Style_Link = 3
Note: the formula used is =AND(B8<>””, Style_Link=3)
So the Conditional Format will only apply this to cells in the area with a value in them and when the Style_Link cell = 2
Funky
This is my Conditional Format style when Style_Link = 4
Note: the formula used is =AND(B8<>””, Style_Link=4, ISODD(Row))
So the Conditional Format will only apply this to cells in the area with a value in them and when the Style_Link cell = 4 and the Row Number is Odd
Obviously we need to apply a second Conditional Format for when the even numbered Rows
It will use the Conditional Format formula: =AND(B8<>””, Style_Link=4, ISEVEN(Row))
You should end up with four Conditional Formats listed as:
Closing Notes
Although in this post I have used a Slicer to supply the user a list of Styles for choice, you could simply use a single cell with a Data Validation Drop Down or a Combo Box to control the style selection process.
The client for which this technique was applied had a dashboard and wanted to have the control appear similar to other slicers on the dashboard hence maintaining the look and feel of the dashboard.
Conclusion
You now have a tool which allows you to dynamically change the styling of your worksheet reports.
You can add extra formatting by using the Style_Link cell to say change the Decimal Places of the numbers in Column E of the report
eg: Assuming my Sales Data is in Column AA, which it is.
In E9: =TEXT(AA9,CHOOSE(Style_Link,”$A 0,000.00″,”A$ 0,000″,”AU\D 0,000″,”F$ 0,000″)))
Copy down
This will apply 2 decimals to Column E when the Boss Style (1) is chosen and zero decimals for everybody else
It will also apply different currency leaders for the different styles
Style 1: Boss $A
Style 2: Black & White A$
Style 3: Boss AUD
Style 4: Funky $F
As mentioned in one of the notes above, you can apply Conditional Formatting independently to the Headers, Footers or Summary areas of the Report, your imagination is the limit.
I’m sure you can think of other modifications to the layout that can be implemented using these techniques
Other Style Links
You may be interested in these other links to worksheet styling functionality:
http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/getting-fancy-with-your-excel-slicers/
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