I wanted to share with you all how to use Excel to randomly pick a contest winner. Apparently there are several ways to do this, as I discovered when I did a Google search for it. For those of you that have done this before, what did you use?
I used good ol’ fashioned Excel. I’m on Excel 70% of my day anyway for work so I didn’t want to learn anything new. And, there’s something really comfortable about that spreadsheet view for me. Makes me naturally trust it, for some weirdo reason.
So, I just created a list of all the eligible entries in my spreadsheet. And used the following formula…
For a copy/paste version of it you can use…
=INDEX(B6:B13, RANDBETWEEN(1,COUNTA(B6:B13)),1)
The only thing you need to customize, is where you see the “B6:B13” – it appears twice in the formula and those are the fields where MY list is in the spreadsheet. You just change those fields to match where YOUR list is. And that’s it. You can now use Excel to randomly pick a contest winner.
Super simple, right? If you give it a try, let me know how my steps worked out for you… If I need to include more info or details, etc.
Have a great day!
So cool!