We can use a variety of formulas to round numbers in Excel depending on the situation. We have ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, MROUND, INT, TRUNC, CEILING, FLOOR, FIXED, EVEN, ODD and few more. To know how to use all these formulas and how to round numbers based on any criteria, just read on.
Rounding Formulas in Excel
Before learning the tips, first lets understand various rounding formulas & what they do. Look at this:
| Formula | What it does? |
| ROUND | Rounds a number to specified decimal points (or multiples of 10) |
| ROUNDUP | Rounds up a number |
| ROUNDDOWN | Rounds down a number |
| MROUND | Rounds to nearest multiple of specified number |
| INT | Rounds down to nearest integer |
| TRUNC | Gives you only integer portion |
| CEILING | Rounds up a number to nearest multiple of 1,10,100… |
| FLOOR | Rounds down a number to nearest multiple of 1,10,100… |
| EVEN | Gives next even number |
| ODD | Gives next odd number |
| FIXED | Rounds and converts to text format (with commas if you want) |
18 Rounding Formula Tips
1. Round to 2 decimal points
Example: 1.2649 to 1.26
2. Round up to 2 decimal points
Example: 1.2649 to 1.27
3. Round to nearest integer
Example: 1.2649 to 1
4. Round to nearest multiple of 10
Example: 544.234 to 540
5. Round up to nearest multiple of 10
Example: 544.234 to 550
6. Round to nearest thousand
Example: 312789123 to 312789000
7. Round to nearest million with one decimal point
Example: 312789123 to 312.8
8. Round to nearest multiple of 2
Example: 43 to 44
9. Round to nearest multiple of 5
Example: 93 to 95
10. Round down to hundred
Example: 301 to 300
11. Get only the integer portion of a number
Example: -23.34 to -23
12. Round a number to 2 decimals and convert to text
Example: 312789.26921 to 312,789.27
13. Get next even number
Example: 42.1 to 44
14. Get next odd number
Example: 44.93 to 45
15. Round to nearest quarter ($0.25)
Example: 19.14 to 19.25
16. Round to next 9 (ie 19,29,39 etc.)
Example: 23 to 29
17. Round up to next 1000
Example: 124567 to 125000
18. Get only decimal portion of a number
Example: 23.345 to 0.345
Download Rounding formula example workbook
Click here to download example workbook & understand these formulas better.
What about .2 tips?
Well, those are for you to fill down. Go ahead and write formulas for both these situations & you have the .2 tips!
18.1 Waiter friendly pricing
Lets say you run a hotel where customers usually tip 15% of bill amount. Now, to make it easy, you want to price your items such that when 15% is added, the total amount becomes a round number like $1.00, $2.00 etc.
For example: If a dish’s current price is $2.50, then 15% tip on it would be $0.37. This makes the total $2.87.
If you modify the price to $2.60, with tip the total would be $3.00.
Assuming current price of a dish is in A1, what formula will give you new price?
18.2 Rounding to nearest Monday
Lets say you have some dates in a list and you want them to round to nearest Monday. Assuming you have a date in A1, what formula gives nearest Monday?
Go ahead and figure them out. Post your answers 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