Forum Discussion
What's the simplest way to make a genuinely random name selection system using Microsoft tools?
For example, suppose I have a list of participants in Excel and want to randomly select one winner without manually choosing from the list. Would you use RAND/RANDBETWEEN in Excel, Power Automate, o...
A 365 formula that does the same thing is
= TAKE(SORTBY(names, RANDARRAY(20)), 3)(in this case selecting 3 distinct winners).
Life gets harder if you want the selection to remain unaltered until you specifically choose to select a new set of winners.
You ask for the simplest way, and this is not it, but it could be useful in that it updates only when the day changes.
= TAKE(SORTBY(names, PseudoRandλ(20,TODAY())),3)
PseudoRandλ
= LAMBDA(length, [seed0],
// Written by Lori Miller
LET(
seed, IF(ISOMITTED(seed0), 123456789, seed0),
case, SEQUENCE(length, , , 0) * {13, -17, 5},
rand, SCAN(seed, case, LAMBDA(s, i, BITXOR(s, BITAND(BITLSHIFT(s, i), 2 ^ 32 - 1)))),
TAKE(rand,,-1) / (2^32)
)
);A pseudo random sequence is determined by the choice of seed value and so is repeatable.