Thanks for participating! You’re an awesome bunch of Excel nerds. The entries in the “You might be an Excel nerd…” giveaway were very entertaining, and read more like my resume than a list of contest entries. Yep, I do some of those things, and I’ll bet you do too.

Thanks again to the generous prize donors:

• Jan Karel Pieterse, of JKP Application Development Services
• Ken Puls, of The Ken Puls Blog
• Jon Peltier, of Peltier Technical Services
• Apress publishers

The Draw

As promised, I did a random draw of prizes and entries. But, in true Excel nerd fashion, I didn’t just drop the names into a hat. No, that might have only taken 5 minutes or so. Instead, I wrote a macro to do the draws for me.

Before the draw, I cleaned up the list of entries, removing the people who said they weren’t participating, and deleting any extra entries per person. I kept the comment numbers with the names, and created a numbered list of prizes, based on the order they appeared in the original giveaway post.

I set up a list to record the draw number, prize number and entry number, then ran the macro. There was even a drum roll at the start of the draw, but it was disappointingly quiet. Oh well, at least everything else went smoothly.

You’d probably do it differently, and maybe without the drum roll, but if you’d like to see the macro that I used, you can download the Draw Macro Sample file. Now you’ll be able to organize your own giveaways!

And the Winners Are…

After the numbers had been selected, I used a couple VLOOKUP formulas to pull the prize names and winner names from the original lists of numbered prizes and entries. Congratulations to all the winners! Here’s the list:

Collect Your Prize

I’ll send an email to all the winners on July 29, 2009, with instructions for claiming your prize. Please reply by 5 PM EDT on Monday August 10, 2009, or your prize will be put back into the vault for the next giveaway.

Note: Some of the prize donors will be away from their offices in August, so there may be a delay in mailing.

Update: I’ve sent out the emails, using the email address that you used in your comment. If you haven’t received your email, please let me know at ddalgleish @ contextures.com

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