Survey Superhero Articles

Creating a random sample in Excel

If you have a list of potential survey respondents in Excel, you can easily select a random sample of them. For example, suppose you have 3,000 customers and you would like to select a random sample of 500 to receive a customer satisfaction survey, follow these steps:

• Add a new column within the spreadsheet and name it Random_number
• In the first cell underneath your heading row, type = RAND(), press enter
• Copy and paste the first cell to other cells for this column of 3000 emails.
• Copy and paste the first cell to other cells for this column of 3000 emails.
• Sort the records by Random_number column.
• Choose the first 500 emails. Those will be the random 500 out of 3000 emails.

To determine how many respondents you need for a random sample, click here.