Do you ever want to have an image or picture lookup in Excel? Something like below.
In this article, learn how to set up an image lookup using Excel. You can use this to display staff details, product images or machine parts etc.
Video - Dynamic Image Lookups in Excel
If you want to understand the picture lookup technique and see it in action, check out my YouTube video below. For text instructions and images, please read on.
Step 1: Set up your data
To get image lookups, you need to set up your data, ideally in a separate worksheet. The trick is to have one image per cell. Something like this:
Tip: Do not use Tables for storing your data. Instead keep them in a spreadsheet range.
Your images need to fit snugly inside the cell, without touching the boundaries for best results.
Also make sure to turn off gridlines on that spreadsheet tab.
You can do this from View ribbon, as depicted below.
Step 2: Write formula to lookup the image
In a separate worksheet, we will write formula to lookup images. Let’s say we have an input cell with employee name in C5.
We need to get the matching employee picture.
The trick is to write a formula that returns a reference to the image of employee in C5.
You can use either INDEX+MATCH or XLOOKUP.
Let’s use XLOOKUP:
=XLOOKUP(C5, data!$D$3:$D$14, data!$C$3:$C$14)
This will return a reference to the cell with the image of employee in C5.
Of course the result of the formula would be 0, as column C (data!$C$3:$C$14) has no values (just pictures) in it.
Step 3: Insert a named range with the formula
Now that we know what formula to write, go to Formula ribbon and click on Define name button.
- Name will be “employee_picture”
- Refers to will be our XLOOKUP formula from above
See below illustration to understand how the name can be created.
Step 4: Set up a picture link to show image lookup result
This is the last step folks. Go to the data worksheet where you have all the pictures.
- Select any one cell with image and copy it (CTRL+C).
- Go back to the results worksheet, right click anywhere and select linked picture from Paste Special options. See below picture to understand.
- You will get a picture of the selected employee. But this one is special. It is linked to the cell you copied.
- Select the picture and formula bar will show the address of the cell to which it refers.
- Now comes the most important step. Go to formula bar and edit the reference. Type =employee_picture and press enter.
Bingo, you have just created a picture lookup.
If you change the input cell and type a different person name, the lookup image will show that person.
Related: Learn more about Picture Links
Tips on using Image Lookup Technique
Image lookup through picture links offers exciting possibilities. Here are some tips & gotchas you want to keep in mind.
- The picture link images are just like any other images in Excel. So when you select them, you can use picture format ribbon to apply various formatting options to them. For example, you can crop them to shape or apply shadow effect to them.
- Picture links work best if all images are of same size.
- While picture links look great on screen, they tend to be grainy when printed.
- They work well with dashboards too. For example, You can use picture links to display top 3 products or bottom 5 sales persons in dashboards.
- For image lookup scenarios, consider adding a missing person image and use that in XLOOKUP if_not_found parameter. It looks amazing.
⬇ Download Picture Lookup Example File
Click here to download sample file with the picture lookup example. It has few different XLOOKUP formulas, an additional image lookup trick to show team members and more. Examine the named ranges to learn how it works.
Got questions about image lookups? Fire away...
Give picture lookups a try and if you face any issues during implementation, please post a comment here so I can help you.
Also, check out these other types of lookups:
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