Can you create balanced teams?

Hi all,

I have "x" categories of different sizes and would like to create "y" teams with the same proportion of each category in it. Also I need the teams to be of equal size plus or minus maximum one individual.

For instance, let's stay I have 3 categories: Bachelor's, 8 students; Master's, 3 students; PhD, 14 students, and I would like to create 4 balanced teams. In this example I will end up in each teams with 2 Bachelor's students, 0 or 1 Master's student and 3 or 4 PhD students. And the total population being 25 (average 6.25), I will have 3 groups of 6 and 1 group of 7.

Now let's assume I have one category per column (e.g. column A is a list of 8 names, column B is a list of 3 names, column C is a list of 14 names): how would you create and balance the groups? It doesn't have to be random, e.g. I can put the first of each category in the first group, etc.

Thanks a lot!

Hi Melvin,

Thanks so much for your quick reply! That works fine. However, I happen to have lists of variable lengths. In other words, if 2 people are missing in the Bachelor's category I will have 2 empty rows in that column. That's why I had my categories separated in columns. So if there is a way to create those teams without changing the way the data lay out that would be great. Otherwise I am now looking for a way to automatically merge my 3 columns into one, given that each column's length is variable.