Craig P is new to Excel and is trying to set up a cafeteria lunch menu. Unfortunately, because the source list of menu items is alphabetical, he ended up with five types of meatballs in one week. Today, episode 1852 shows how to use RANDBETWEEN and INDEX to solve the problem,
Transcript of the video:
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Learn Excel form MrExcel podcast, episode 1852.
Randomizing the Lunch Menu.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today's question sent in by CraigP, who started using Excel this week.
How can I randomized the cafeteria specials menu?
Right now, everything is appearing alphabetically, which leads to whole string of related menus and student unrest.
All right! So, here's a list of all of our cafeteria specials and if we grab this filling handle here and drag down am on right click while I drag that and choose fill weekdays, then we can quickly fill in all the Monday through Friday dates, but then the natural thing you're going to do is type an equal sign here click on H1 and we'll double click the fill handle to shoot that formula down.
The problem is here this week Monday January 27th we're going to have a whole week of meatballs, which is going to get really, really, really boring.
So, a couple of different ways to solve this.
So, this would actually make a great dueling Excel podcast with Mike Girvin, but the way that I'm going to do this as equal INDEX and we have our whole array of menu choices over here.
I'll press F4 to lock that down because as I copy the formula down I want to make sure that I'm always pointing at the same range and then we're going to ask for RANDBETWEEN, RANDBETWEEN either the first item up to the 25th item So, that's going to say hey, just give us a random item there.
Now, there's a possibility here that we might get the same menu item somewhere during the month, but at least you're not going to have a whole string of different meatball recipes because they happen to fall alphabetically.
Hey, I want to thank Craig for sending that question and I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Hey, as a postscript, dan! That was a great use of Excel in your introduction to teaching episode.
I took a look at the spreadsheet here nice use of Excel 2010, great formulas impressive use of cell styles even a great kudos to the continuity team for the five different types of meatballs they're very very funny.
Hey, by the way give me a shout we'll get you a Macro that gets it Excel cafeteria menu to replace this word flyer that you have over there by the paper.
Learn Excel form MrExcel podcast, episode 1852.
Randomizing the Lunch Menu.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today's question sent in by CraigP, who started using Excel this week.
How can I randomized the cafeteria specials menu?
Right now, everything is appearing alphabetically, which leads to whole string of related menus and student unrest.
All right! So, here's a list of all of our cafeteria specials and if we grab this filling handle here and drag down am on right click while I drag that and choose fill weekdays, then we can quickly fill in all the Monday through Friday dates, but then the natural thing you're going to do is type an equal sign here click on H1 and we'll double click the fill handle to shoot that formula down.
The problem is here this week Monday January 27th we're going to have a whole week of meatballs, which is going to get really, really, really boring.
So, a couple of different ways to solve this.
So, this would actually make a great dueling Excel podcast with Mike Girvin, but the way that I'm going to do this as equal INDEX and we have our whole array of menu choices over here.
I'll press F4 to lock that down because as I copy the formula down I want to make sure that I'm always pointing at the same range and then we're going to ask for RANDBETWEEN, RANDBETWEEN either the first item up to the 25th item So, that's going to say hey, just give us a random item there.
Now, there's a possibility here that we might get the same menu item somewhere during the month, but at least you're not going to have a whole string of different meatball recipes because they happen to fall alphabetically.
Hey, I want to thank Craig for sending that question and I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Hey, as a postscript, dan! That was a great use of Excel in your introduction to teaching episode.
I took a look at the spreadsheet here nice use of Excel 2010, great formulas impressive use of cell styles even a great kudos to the continuity team for the five different types of meatballs they're very very funny.
Hey, by the way give me a shout we'll get you a Macro that gets it Excel cafeteria menu to replace this word flyer that you have over there by the paper.
