Selecting random with exclutions

[owutne]

I posted this as a request to a company that provides Excel plug-ins, but I see now the task is more suitable solved in Access. So if anyone please can help me with the following:


I have a challenge in generating a selection from witch I need to make sure that my selection are the ones that has not been participated for the longest time. Ok, I'll go in details:
In my block we have 8 rooms, each with max 6 inhabitants. Every once in a while some of the inhabitants will move and others come to take their place. That is my selection of prospects. Now; every day one of my prospects needs to clean the corridor, but I need to make sure it is being drawn randomly and fairly where it is the longest time since last time of participation. I use columns B to AF to represent every day of month, and column A with rows 3 to 42 for unique nr for each prospect. for every day I'll mark an x for participation.



Does your software handle this?

Any answer will be highly appreciated!

Best regards
Ole Wegard Utne

[NassauBob]

This is a rather cryptic request, for sure. But I want to give my two cents here:

First, you appear to have two contradictory concepts here, in 'randomly and fairly', and 'longest time since last...'. Random is chaotic - there is no unfair in completely random. Two or even three consecutive days sweeping the P-way is random and fair, if every member has an equal chance of being selected each day. So that is something you need to consider.

Second, your table will have a fixed number of rows and columns, of which the data will occasionally change, but only with the addition of a single value, the 'x'. I think that if there ever was a good reason to use Excel over Access, this is it. The data manipulation power of Access would be woefully wasted in this project; you will, in my opinion, find much better success in Excel with this particular task.

I apologize for not providing a solution to your problem, but I think that to make a solid fix for this would require a lot of tedious and frustrating code-wrangling.

Shane