Mixed doubles round robin scheduling

I'd like to use Excel to create round-robin schedules for mixed doubles events. In these events, each team consists of one man and one woman, but partners and opponents should rotate every round so that every man eventually partners with every woman, and competes against as many different teams as possible. After researching the topic, it turns out that the actual mathematics are very complex for a universal solution, but I'm looking at events that will have no more than 12 women and 12 men. Hopefully that will simplify the calculations. One complication is that if the number of participants is not a multiple of 4 (e.g. 5 men and 5 women), then byes must also be calculated and tracked so that everyone sits out the same number of times. I'm thinking that this may not be possible with the standard Excel functions, so I'm guessing that it will most likely require a VBA solution.

Take a look at this thread from yesterday:

http://www.excelforum.com/excel-gene...binations.html

Hope this helps.

Pete

Thanks for the tip, but it won't do what I need. I have started with the men all being even numbers, and the women all odd numbers, with the idea that I could develop an algorithm to only pair an odd with an even, but that's only the first step. You then have to pair each odd/even team against another odd/even team that they haven't played before. The tracking gets pretty complicated pretty fast. And that doesn't include choosing and tracking the byes. Any other thoughts?

HI. Did you ever find a solution for your round robin. I coordinate an event every year and the pairing is the hardest part. We do three rounds mixed doubles, switching partners and various numbers of participants.
Thanks!
Susan