Pairing people from different groups

[PairingPeople]

I have a list of names that I would like to pair up, but across groups so that people within the same group do not get matched. A person also cannot match with himself. (If possible i can make pairs multiple times and 2 people cannot pair more than once together. I hope this makes sense. Is there a way of doing this in Excel please?

 

[ValuationMan]

No I don't know what you are asking. Can you share an example of your data?

 

[PairingPeople]

I don't know if this is a hard thing to do. The pairing with more rounds and not getting the same pairs is the hardest I assume. So this is optional. If I use this in real life with more names the change of getting the same pair twice is small.

 

[ValuationMan]

The solution depends on how you want the people paired. It's easiest if you decide that the first pairing will must depts 1 and 2 together and 3 and 4 and the next pairing is 1 and 3 and 2 and 4, etc. If that's the case, you can easily use RAND() for each of the people and match the lowest numbers together, next lowest, etc. That can be accomplished by sorting the data or using LARGE() or SMAL(). Does any of that make sense?

 

[PairingPeople]

Yes I am aware of that function. But I was wondering if there was a way that Excel kan just choose 2 random names from any collum. The only rule is that it can't be 2 names from the same collum.

 

[ValuationMan]

I guess to answer your question, there is not an out of the box formula to do that, but there are several ways you could do a combination of formulas to do it. I'll come up with one as I have time.

 

[PairingPeople]

I guess to answer your question, there is not an out of the box formula to do that, but there are several ways you could do a combination of formulas to do it. I'll come up with one as I have time.

That would be great!

 

[PairingPeople]

I don't know if this is a hard thing to do. The pairing with more rounds and not getting the same pairs is the hardest I assume. So this is optional. If I use this in real life with more names the change of getting the same pair twice is small.

Maybe also possible: put all the names in collum A, the department in collum B. Then a formule that matches anyone 2 names from collum A but collum B can’t be the same value. Maybe that is easier?