Spreadsheet Planning: Excel Saves Halloween

Well, maybe Excel didn’t actually save Hallowe’en, but it helped the Double Fine video game company allocate staff for their Hallowe’en game — Costume Quest.

In an interview at MTV, Tim Schafer, Double Fine’s president and CEO, described how the staff members, who had previously all worked on the same project, were split into four working groups.

“we let people fill out a form where they got to rank which game they worked on and then we also let the leaders on each team rank who they wanted on their team. We had this amazing Excel spreadsheet that, somehow, using algebra, or possibly calculus, decided the intersection of those two ranks to put everyone on the team they most wanted to be on and also where they were most needed.”

Unfortunately, they didn’t share the Excel file or the magical formulas, but maybe you’ve done something similar at your own workplace. Or maybe that’s how you decide which of your children get to wear which Hallowe’en costume!

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