by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on
The tutorial will teach you two quick ways to randomize in Excel: perform random sort with formulas and shuffle data by using a special tool.
Microsoft Excel provides a handful of different sorting options including ascending or descending order, by color or icon, as well as custom sort. However, it lacks one important feature - random sort. This functionality would come in handy in situations when you need to randomize data, say, for an unbiased assigning of tasks, allocation of shifts, or picking a lottery winner. This tutorial will teach you a couple of easy ways to do random sort in Excel.
Although there is no native function to perform random sort in Excel, there is a function to generate random numbers (Excel RAND function) and we are going to use it.
Assuming you have a list of names in column A, please follow these steps to randomize your list:
Or, you can go to the Data tab > Sort & Filter group, and click the ZA button .
Either way, Excel automatically expands the selection and sorts the names in column A as well:
Tips & notes:
If you don't have time to fiddle with formulas, use the Random Generator for Excel tool included with our Ultimate Suite to do a random sort faster.
In this example, we need to shuffle cells in column A, so we go with the third option:
And voilà, our list of names is randomized in no time:
If you are curious to try this tool in your Excel, you are welcome to download an evaluation version below. Thank you for reading!
Ultimate Suite 14-day fully-functional version
Random Generator for Google Sheets
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