Friends and supporters of Chandoo.org,
I am very happy to tell you about another great way to learn Excel & stay awesome
Chandoo.org podcast
That is right. As part our mission to make you awesome in Excel, this year I will be adding a podcast.
A podcast eh? Why?
Let me tell you a story first. One of my goals for 2014 is to increase my stamina. So on Jan 1st of 2014, I opened Nike + app on my iPhone, went to coach feature and selected “Run 10K” as my first goal. It has been 3 years since I ran 10k. So I wanted to get back in the game to improve my fitness and health. The app suggested an 8 week program to help me reach 10k. It sounded difficult, as I had to run more than 250 KM in 8 weeks. But I pushed on. As of today, I am at 177. I know I missed a few days here and there, but I already ran 10K thrice since starting and I feel good about where I am today.
Dude… what are you talking about? I am here to know about the podcast!
I am coming to that. To give me company during the runs, I choose a bunch of podcasts. This is the first time in my life I paid serious attention to podcasts. It is a fruitful experience. Every time I go for a jog, not only I am getting healthier, but also smarter. I realized how powerful, effective and useful podcasting can be. So I thought, “Why not provide similar experience to our readers?”
And thus born the idea of Chandoo.org Podcast.
How will the podcast help you?
I am still at the drawing board when it comes to our show. But here is what you will gain,
- Strategies & tactics: You will learn about various spreadsheet design strategies, tactics, tricks and ideas I follow. You will learn how to handle tricky situations (like lots of data, changing requirements, dynamic everything, no vba etc.).
- Whats new: What is happening the world of spreadsheets, data analysis, visualization, reporting & self-service BI. My views & opinions mixed with latest industry trends.
- Tips & Tricks: Excel tips, tricks, ideas that are easy to remember and quick to implement.
- Interviews: Interviews with fellow Excel gurus, bloggers, MVPs and authors. Hopefully we get to feature Microsoft Excel team members, industry leaders and other prominent figures.
- Case studies & Personal experiences: Explanations on projects, things I am learning and how to manage large-scale spreadsheet development projects.
- Book & Product Reviews: I read a lot of books on data analysis. I also come across quite a few add-ins, templates, Excel courses. My views and recommendations on the same so that you can make informed decisions.
- Ask Chandoo: Send me your questions. I will answer them in the podcast.
- Announcements: Announcements about my upcoming training programs, live classes or products so that you can make the best use of them.
When is it launching?
In the first week of May. I will share more details once we are ready to go. Few more things:
- It is free and awesome. Just like our articles, tutorials & examples.
- You can subscribe to it thru iTunes, Zune or other popular pod-casting directories.
- You can also listen to it from our site.
- Full episodes, show notes, resources and downloadable templates will be posted on our site.
- I am hoping to do a show once every 2 weeks. Lets see how this goes.
What should we call it?
If all of this sounds interesting, here is how you can help.
I am still not sure what to call this podcast. I have a few options for the name. Can you suggest one?
The names I am thinking are,
- Awesome.xls
- Speaking Cells
- Become Awesome Analyst Podcast
- Chandoo.org Podcast
Can you tell me which one should I use? Post your choice in the comments.
PS: If you don’t like any of these names, suggest some.
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