Shuffle data in Google Sheets

Power Tools provides you with a set of add-ins to speed up most of your daily tasks in Google Sheets. Shuffle is one of those utilities. It will help you randomize cells, rows, and columns in your Google spreadsheet.

Before you start

The Shuffle tool also processes cells in filtered & hidden rows & columns.

How to use the Shuffle tool

Start the add-on

  1. Select the range with the values you want to randomize in your sheet.
  2. Go to Extensions > Power Tools > Start in the Google Sheets menu:
    Start Power Tools from the Google Sheets menu.
  3. Click the Shuffle icon to open the tool:
    Find the add-on's icon in Power Tools.

How to shuffle cells, rows, and columns in Google Sheets

You can choose one of five ways to sort values at random:
Choose the way to randomize your data.

  • To shuffle records within the selected rows independently, select Cells in each row.
  • Pick Cells in each column to randomly sort entries within each column.
  • Choose Entire rows to keep data in the rows intact and randomize only the row order.
  • If you select Entire columns, the add-on will shuffle the order of the selected columns only.
  • Click on All cells in the range to have all selected values mixed randomly.

Once the shuffling mode is selected, click on the Shuffle button to randomize values within the selected range.

Responses

I need assistance related to utilizing power tools which I activated already.
Still, the error message appears.

Hi,
After using the shuffle tool on rows which have cells including dates

When trying to copy to another sheet they dates come up as numbers etc
43654
43644
42730
42037
40884
41662
42585
37441
43150
42104

as opposed to
23 Dec 2016
02 Feb 2015
07 Dec 2011

Is there any way to fix this?
Only seems to be an issue when I have used power tolls to shuffle

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for contacting us. For us to be able to help you better, please share a sample spreadsheet with your source data with us (support@apps4gs.com) so we might reproduce this issue on our side. When sharing, make sure the option 'Notify people' is checked. To grant us access to your data, press the Share button at the upper right corner of Google Sheets and enter support@apps4gs.com.

Note. We keep that Google account for file sharing only and don't monitor its Inbox. Please do not email there. Once you share the file, just confirm in this message thread.
If you have confidential information there, you can replace it with some irrelevant data, just keep the format.

We'll do our best to help.

Whesley Smart says:
February 14, 2020 at 9:54 am

Can this be done via mobile? When I do click add-ons it gives me 6 other apps to in-store but don't tell me what I actually need.

Katerina Bespalaya (Ablebits Team) says:
February 14, 2020 at 12:27 pm

Hello Whesley,

Thank you for your question. Please note that our add-ons were designed to work in the desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari on a Mac). If you open Google Sheets in a mobile browser, we can't guarantee that our add-ons will work there since we do not support mobile platforms.

Is there a way to use the randomizes with rules? I am trying to shuffle our team’s schedule. One member of our team will always have a higher probability of being placed as she has six combinations but I don’t want her to be place too many times in a row.

i have 4 cells in 2 rows like this:
[player x] [24]
[player y] [18]

the first row have a red background and the second row have a yellow background.
I want to switch between the two rows *including* their background so i will look like this:
[player y] [18] (with yellow background)
[player x] [24] (with red background)

help me please!! thank you

Post a comment

Seen by everyone, do not publish license keys and sensitive personal info!

If you have any questions or issues with this add-in, please feel free to post your concerns in the comments area. As soon as we answer, a notification message will be sent to your e-mail. If you do not want to share your thoughts in public, please contact us at support@ablebits.com.