Jo (wife) likes to watch Masterchef Australia (link), a cooking reality show every night. Even though I do not find contestant’s culinary combats comforting, occasionally I just sit and watch. You see, I like food.
The basic premise of the program is who cooks best in given time. To tell people how much time is left, they use a clock that looks like this:
The needle indicates how much time is left (much like a stop clock, with a small twist).
One day, while watching such intense battle, my mind went
- It be cool to make such a clock using hmm… Excel?
- Wouldn’t it be cool to grill a snapper & eat it than watch someone else do it
While I cannot share my snapper (or pretty much any other food item) with you, I can share my Masterchef style Excel clock with you. So behold,
Here comes the Masterchef style Clock in Excel
How is it cooked?
Don’t you worry. This recipe is not as complicated as a Masterchef recipe. With enough time & trigonometry, anyone can do it.
The clock (chart) has 2 parts. Dial & rotating hand.
While we can create both of them in one chart, I choose the path of least resistance i.e. Make one chart each for Dial & Hand and overlap them nicely.
Making the Dial
This is simpler than it looks. All we need is numbers 60 thru 5 (60,55,50…10,5) in a range & twelve 1s in another range. Then, we select both and make a radar chart. Once you adjust it, it should look like this:
Making the Rotating Hand
The hand is nothing but a line on a scatter plot with (0,0) as one point & (x,y) as another point. To calculate (x,y) we need to know how many degrees our hand should be rotated.
Hand of our clock starts at 60 and rotates clock-wise (duh!). That means if the time completed is 5, our clock’s hand should be 300 away from initial position.
Thus, x = sin(300), y = cos(300)
Same in Excel would be SIN(RADIANS(30)), COS(RADIANS(30))
For more on this calculation, refer to Spoke Chart Technique.
Running the clock (using VBA)
Our job is not done when the clock is assembled. We must give it batteries thru VBA.
The basic logic for running the clock is simple:
- When clock is running
- Check if it next second yet
- Move the hand (by modifying the value of done seconds)
- If not, just wait
You can see the code (and break it if you must) in the download file.
Download Excel Clock & Play with it
Click here to download this clock. Examine the macros assigned to the buttons. Play & Pause the clock.
Do you watch Masterchef?
Of course I am kidding. What I am really keen to know is do you make any clock / timer related things in Excel? I use timer features often to add animation, count-down features to my workbooks. They work really well.
What about you? Have you used such techniques? What is your experience? Please share using comments.
PS: If you must know, I prefer Amazing Race to Masterchef. I guess I get more pleasure watching people run around globe than run around in a kitchen.
More Charting Recipes
If you like a well cooked chart, we have got one too many in our pantry. Check out,
- Spoke chart in Excel
- Grammy bump chart
- Competitive Analysis Chart
- Polar Clock in Excel
- Data around the clock
Or consider joining my Excel School program to cook fine Excel workbooks & charts. Click here.
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