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Asked: 2026-06-08T03:50:00+00:00

I need to translate an old program working on AS/400 that was picking random

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I need to translate an old program working on AS/400 that was picking random students to work for my city. I can use any program, as long as it works. To make it simple and fast, i chose excel.

However, i come over a small problem. I need to have no duplicates, because the same student can’t do 2 jobs over one summer. Also, i need this to be flexible, since every year, new students will be added and some will be deleted.

This function works almost as much as i would want it:
=INDEX($A:$A,RANDBETWEEN(1,COUNTA($A:$A)),1)

The index $A:$A gets all the lines in the column A. So even if i add 20 names, it will take them into consideration. Then it choose randomly a value (the name) between the line 1 and the number of total lines (COUNTA) in the column $A. The problem with this method is that it allows duplicates.

Another function i found was to create a colum full of =ALEA() and then rank these by the numbers. This is not very pretty, but at least, there is no duplicates. The problem comes from my formula, that is static, and that i can’t make flexible:

=INDEX($A$2:$A$74,RANK(B2,$B$2:$B$74))

My names are in the colum $A and my random values in colum $B. What i say is, rank the value in B2 (then B3, then B4, etc.) that is found in the column B.

What i would like is to integrate the COUNTA into the second function and (IF POSSIBLE) take the RANDBETWEEN instead of the rank function so that i don’t have ugly numbers.

I am opened to use the first function with some kind of duplicate check. As long as the secretary doesn’t have to do a lot of manipulation, it should be fine.

Thanks a lot for your help xox

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve created something in VBA that does what I think you want. Now keep in mind I’m very new with VBA, so it probably isn’t the prettiest thing. To be clear, I had 10 names in column A from rows 1 to 10 and then simply ran this subroutine and it generated a list of unique names in column F. Here’s my code:

    Sub getRandom()
    Do While Application.WorksheetFunction.CountA(Range("A:A")) > 0
        Dim count As Integer
        count = Application.WorksheetFunction.CountA(Range("A:A"))
        Dim name As String
        name = Application.WorksheetFunction.Index(Range("A:A"), Application.WorksheetFunction.RandBetween(1, count))
        Dim row As Integer
        row = Application.WorksheetFunction.Match(name, Range("A:A"), 0)
        Range("F11").Select
        Selection = name
        Rows(row).EntireRow.Delete
    Loop
End Sub

    If you wanted to get the names one at a time, just remove the loop. How it works is it does exactly what you did with the INDEX and RANDBETWEEN functions, grabs the name in column A with that generated number, then deletes that row entirely, and thus no unique name is generated.

    I chose column F arbitrarily and cell F11 specifically since that cell will not be affected when the rows are deleted.

    I hope this helps, and if it’s not what you were looking for I’ll see if I can enhance it a bit.

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