Back in the day (maybe 20 years ago), you couldn’t just ask Alexa or Siri or Google for a random number. You could pick numbers out of a hat, but that took a lot of work, and what if not all the numbers are perfectly identical? You could ask a disinterested 3rd party to pick a number, but can a person actually do anything randomly?
So I learned that you can make a random number generator in Excel. In the video, I show you a couple quick and easy ways to do this. If you are an accounting nerd, you will enjoy this.
The two functions you can use are:
- =RAND(): This one usually takes a little extra work because it gives you a random number between 0 and 1…which sounds kind of odd. Is it randomly a one or a zero? Actually it returns a number like 0.4876813456456. I usually use this with either RANK() or ROUNDUP().
- =RANDBETWEEN(): This is the easiest one to use where you enter in the starting and ending numbers. If you want a random number between 1 and 10, you use the formula =RANDBETWEEN(1,10).
Below I have the video plus some useful links, including the example file I use in the video.
Useful Links
- Example File: https://jctaccounting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Random.xlsx
- Microsoft’s RAND(): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/rand-function-4cbfa695-8869-4788-8d90-021ea9f5be73
- Microsoft’s RANDBETWEEN(): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/randbetween-function-4cc7f0d1-87dc-4eb7-987f-a469ab381685