Excel has hundreds of formulas. But as a new learner or user, you may want to just focus on top 10 formulas to get the most out of it. Assuming you already know the basics (check out Beginner Excel page if you are complete newbie), here is a list of top 10 Excel formulas for you.
Top 10 Excel Formulas – The list
#1 Table & Structural References
If you don’t know how to effectively talk to your data, then your formulas will suck. That is why, my #1 formula is not even a formula. Learn how to refer to data in the spreadsheet, especially in tables. You can use tablename[column name] notation to refer to entire columns of data. You can also use [@column] to refer to column value in the current row of table.
For example, you can write formulas like these:
- SUM(mySales[no. of customers]) to find how many customers we had.
- SUMIFS(mySales[no. of customers], mySales[product], “FastCar”) to find how many customers bought “FastCar”
Learn more about tables & structural references in Excel.
#2 Bye bye nested IF, Hello IFS formula
You might already know about IF formula. We use it to test logical conditions and output one of two possibilities. But what if you have a very long, complex scenario that requires multiple IF functions? Simple, use IFS() instead. It can take any number of condition, output combinations and works elegantly.
Example Nested IF formula: =IF(A1>20, “Very high”, IF(A1>15, “High”, IF(A1>10, “Medium”, IF(A1>5, “Low”, “Very Low”))))
Same formula as IFS() =IFS(A1>20,"Very high", A1>15,"High", A1>10,"Medium", A1>5,"Low", A1<=5,"Very low")#3 SUMIFS / COUNTIFS
Almost all business analysis situations will involve questions like “what is the count / sum of things that meet conditions A,B…N”. And to answer them elegantly and swiftly, you need SUMIFS / COUNTIFS. The beauty of these functions is that they are easy to learn and use.
Example SUMIFS formula:
=SUMIFS(data[Purchase Amount], data[Lead Group],"Online", data[Quantity], ">3")
Sums up [Purchase Amount] column where [Lead Group] is online AND [Quantity] is more than 3. Learn all about SUMIFS formula.
#4 SWITCH – CHOOSE() for new age
SWITCH is one of the new functions introduced in Excel. This versatile function helps you select one of the many outcomes based on any type of conditions. In some ways, SWITCH is similar to IFS, but it also has default option, so if none of the SWITCH conditions are met, you get value in the default parameter.
Example SWITCH formula:
=SWITCH([@State],"CO","Other","WA","Other","TX","South","East")
What it does?
Looks at [@State] value and prints one of the outputs - "Other", "South" or "East"
#5 VLOOKUP – Always in style
The other day, I went to drinks with a few mates after work. We were sitting in a hip bar drinking best of Wellington beer on a sunny day. I overhear two ladies talking about, wait for it…. VLOOKUP. I turn around and look at them. They look like fresh graduates celebrating a busy week of work and they could be talking about almost anything, but VLOOKUP is trending.
So yeah, learn VLOOKUP you must. It is the quintessential Excel function for data analysis. You can answer questions about your data using VLOOKUP.
If you are an absolute VLOOKUP virgin, try introduction to VLOOKUP page or What is VLOOKUP video. For more advanced lookup trickery and examples, checkout VLOOKUP tag or get a copy of my VLOOKUP Book.
#6 SUBTOTAL – Filter what you want, see summaries
You know that SUM(), COUNT(), AVERAGE() etc. give you basic stats about your data. But what if you filtered out to look at data for “HR department” only or “people aged between 25 and 40”. Your SUM() doesn’t change.
This is where SUBTOTAL() comes in. By default, SUBTOTAL ignores anything that is filtered away. So what you see is what you get.
Example SUBTOTAL formula:
=SUBTOTAL(9,data[Purchase Amount])
Sums up (9) filtered values in data[Purchase Amount] column.Learn more about Excel SUBTOTAL formula.
#7 MAXIFS / MINIFS
You may already know about MAX() and MIN() formulas. But what if you want to know the maximum value based on a few criteria? Simple, use MAXIFS(). This newly added function is simple, versatile and easy to learn (if you know SUMIFS, then you know this too).
Example MAXIFS() formula:
=MAXIFS(data[Purchase Amount], data[Lead Group],"Online")
Returns maximum data[Purchase Amount] where [Lead Group] is "Online"#8 FIND / SEARCH
There are heaps of text formulas in Excel. But if you are just starting out, go with FIND(). It finds one text value inside another. If there is a match, FIND() returns the starting position of the match, else #VALUE error.
Keep in mind though, FIND() is case sensitive. Use SEARCH() if you don’t care about the case of data.
Examples of Excel FIND() and SEARCH() functions.
- =FIND(“l”, “Hello people..”) => 3
- =FIND(“P”, “Hello people..”) => #VALUE! error as P can’t be found.
- =FIND(“p”, “Hello people..”) => 7
- =SEARCH(“P”, “Hello people..”) => 7 as SEARCH doesn’t care for case
- =FIND(“p”, “Hello people..”, 8) => 10 Finds p after 8th letter – i.e. second p
#9 TODAY / NOW
Almost all business data will have a component of dates. So learning how to work with date & time values in Excel can be a huge help. If you are new to this, start with TODAY(). As the name suggests, TODAY() tells you the current date. This is a dynamic formula, so if you write =TODAY() in a cell, the date changes every day.
You can use NOW() formula to see current date & time.
Example – Calculating employee tenure in days:
If you have start date of an employee in a cell (A1), you can calculate their tenure (service) using TODAY() formula like this.
=TODAY() - A1
The answer will be number of days between A1 (Start date) and today.Learn all about working with date & time values in Excel.
#10 IFERROR – when #N/A happens
To err is human, to IFERROR is awesome.
Errors happen, but use IFERROR so that your audience see soothing messages rather than confounding #VALUE!s. IFERROR looks at internal formula or expression and if there is an error, prints alternative result you want.
Example IFERROR():
=IFERROR(VLOOKUP("THIS", Customers, 2, false), "Customer not found")
Looks for "THIS" in Customers table and returns 2nd column value if found, else says "Customer not found".Overview & Examples of Excel IFERROR formula.
Watch Top 10 Excel formulas – Video
I made a video about these top 10 formulas with an example data set. You will learn all the basics + some nifty tricks about these formulas in the video. Check it out below or watch it on my YouTube channel.
Download Top 10 formulas – Example workbook
Click here to download top 10 formula example file. Examine the formulas & table calculations to learn more. Use the data to write your own formulas and practice these skills.
Want to master formulas? – 3 resources for you
If you want to learn more about Excel formulas, you have come to the right place. Check out below three resources and be a formula master.
#1 – Read other formula articles
Formulas / functions are central to doing any kind of complex work in Excel. No wonder we have more than 400 pages on this on my site. Start with these examples and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
- 100 Excel formulas for beginners
- Top 10 formulas for aspiring analysts – recommended
- What to do when Excel formula errors
#2 – Get a book
There are 100s of Excel books out there. I recommend getting one or two good ones to slowly & surely improve your skill. Start with these…
- Excel 2016 Bible by John Walkenbach
- Data Analysis & Business Modeling by Wayne Winston
- My book – The VLOOKUP Book by Chandoo
#3 – Learn from a course
Online video courses are easy and powerful way to learn everything you need from the comfort of your chair. I highly recommend either of these two for mastering Excel formulas & data analysis.
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