Google Apps Hacks

57  -PICK A WINNER AT RANDOM

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HaCK 20:

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Use the RAND function in combination with sorting to pick rst-,

second-, and third-place winners from a list.

Google Spreadsheets gives you many formulas. To view all of them—242, at the time of this

writing—open a new spreadsheet at http://docs.google.com, switch to the Formulas tab, and

click the “more” link to the right. You can now scroll through the different groups and jump to a

help entry for a particular formula by selecting the “more” link next to them. The INT function, for

example, rounds a given number down to its integer component, turning a 2.7 into a 2. SEARCH

returns the position of a text segment within a longer string. The GoogleLookup function polls

data from the Web .

Another interesting function is RAND, which returns a random number between 0 and 1. Inspired by

David and Raina Hawley’s “Random Sorting” hack in Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition, here’s how you can use

RAND to pick a winner from a list of participants. First, create a list of participants by adding a Name

and a Rank column. Fill the Name column with a list of names, as shown in Figure 3-6.

Now, select the eld next to the rst participant, type =RAND() and hit return (or pick the RAND

function from the Formulas menu). On some systems, you can now select the eld and ...