My office has baseball season tickets for Business Development purposes. Every so often, we have games that aren’t reserved for BD, so we raffle them off for the employees. Before I got here, the raffle coordinator would actually conduct a raffle… printing out each person’s name on a strip of paper, folding it up, putting it in a hat and drawing a winner. What a waste of time! This is so much faster. And since most of our employees aren’t in the main office any way, it doesn’t matter how a winner is selected (just as long as it’s random).
Here’s how we do raffles in Excel now:
1. Set up the list of names in Excel. All the names should be in one column.
2. Go to Random.org and use the sequence generator to generate a squence of numbers in one column:
3. Copy-and-paste the column into Excel, next to the names:
4. Go to Formulas>Math & Trig>RANDBETWEEN. Put “1″ in the first box and the number of people in the second box.
5. This generates a random number (in this case, 4) and the person with the corresponding number is the winner! (in this case, Liz Lemon!)
how fabulous is that!
who knew randomness could be so… structured and easy! 
That is insane… I liked the “write all the names on a piece of paper, throw it up in the air and pick me” way though.
This is brilliant but you made me laugh because you write like you are making an infomercial and the old way is filmed in black and white and everyone has exasperated expression “the raffle coordinator would actually conduct a raffle… printing out each person’s name on a strip of paper, folding it up, putting it in a hat and drawing a winner. What a waste of time”
[...] winner will be selected using random.org (using a method similar to this) and announced on Friday, May [...]