Hello everyone,

I'm doing some Random Matching in Excel 2003 for statistical purposes: I've got a file with two worksheets containing student records (ID, courses, grades, etc). One sheet contains 'Students who were tutored' (200 or so records) and the other 'Students who were not tutored' (800 or so records).

Now I'd like to match up (pair up) those students of same ***, same course and same age from both of these into one new sheet - while maintaining a RANDOM selection for those 'Students who were not tutored' of the same *** etc.

A few years ago I used something like this, but I can't recall what all this means (using the steps I used):
  1. Created a tab called Y (for yes - tutored) lists all the tutored students listed, and N (for not tutored).
  2. On the N tab, I have created a series called TBL1 producing random numbers using the =RAND(), next to this column I have a column of numbers generated based on the following formula {=RANK(TBL1,TBL1)}
  3. On a seperate tab called RND_CALC, I have the first column listing the student number of the Tutored students using the following: =OFFSET(Y!$A$1,INT((ROW(A1)+2)/2),). In the second listing the non-tutored students using: =OFFSET(N!$A$1,N!K2,)
  4. On the RND_CALC tab, I then have a "***", "AGE", "COURSE" column. Each having the following:

    *** =--(VLOOKUP($A2,Y!$A$2:$D$25,COLUMN(B1),0)=VLOOKUP($B2,N!$A$2:$D$62,COLUMN(B1),0))
    AGE =--(VLOOKUP($A2,Y!$A$2:$D$25,COLUMN(C1),0)=VLOOKUP($B2,N!$A$2:$D$62,COLUMN(C1),0))
    COURSE =--(VLOOKUP($A2,Y!$A$2:$D$25,COLUMN(C1),0)=VLOOKUP($B2,N!$A$2:$D$62,COLUMN(C1),0))

Can someone help me make some sense on how to ensure random matching with this setup?

Thanks in advance,
Sab.