There are 560 unique combinations of 20 people taken 3 at a time.

I would generate those combinations and then make a copy for a total of
1120.

Then I would assign the list of 1036 to these.

Put the 20 names in B1 to U1

Then in row 1 to 1121, put a 1 below each person that would interview a the
candiate in that row.

then to get a list for each interviewer, you could use an autofilter.

This sounds like a scheduling nightmare, however.

It seems like you would probably want to organize 6 teams with two floaters,
or 5 teams of 4 with one person being designated as a backup for each team.


Also, your initial analysis is off. You need to conduct 3*1036 interviews,
so each person would need to do

(3*1036)/20 = 155.4 interviews, not 52/51

I can generate the 560 combinations if you need it.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


"Dick Hassler" wrote in message
...
Example: I have 1,036 nominees and each one has to be interviewed by 3
different people out of a group of 20 interviewers.

1,036/20 = 51.8 nominees per interviewer
1,036-(51*20)=16
So 16 people would have 52 nominees and 4 would have 51 nominees.
(!6*52)+4*51=1,036
And I can figure all this out ahead of time.

So I use INT(RAND()*20) in 3 columns and 1036 rows.

Of course some rows will have duplicates but I can, in another 3 columns
look at the rows with duplicates and assign another random number to
replace the duplicate, no big deal. In my test case I did this two
times and afterward only had 3 rows left with duplicates.

The problem is that INT(RAND()*20) has no idea that it can only have 51
zeros, 51 ones, 51 twos, etc or 52 instead of the 51, I can manually
adjust for the 4 51s and 16 52s.

In my test case here is what happened
165 zeros
158 ones
190 twos
150 threes
167 fours
142 fives
157 sixes
166 sevens
159 eights
147 etc
170
154
160
141
152
154
154
135
143
147
-----
3111 total random numbers assigned, I only wanted 1,036.

Not cool.

So I have to find something better or someway to limit my command with
another command while at the same time leaving the randomness.

Any ideas?