asked on

Weighted Rankings - MS Excel

Hello Experts, attached will give you more clear picture of what am I trying to achieve.
In short (the example is oversimplified for clarity):
Mom, Dad, and little Sarah are deciding on a house purchase. They narrowed down their choices to 3 houses: House A,House B, and House C. They have created this chart (see attached) and assigned a score to each important criteria they deemed necessary. They now want to use this tool in order to determine which house is the best option.
I want to make this chart "dynamic" e.g. the WEIGHT column (column B) needs to always add up to 100% and each criteria item to be able to be assigned a different weight (currently all items have an equal weight of 20), depending on who is making the decision, for example:

If it is up to little Sarah to make the decision she would place more weight on "close to school " and 'kids to play' items, Mom wants to give a higher weight on 'close to mall' and dad, for some reason, assigns the highest weight on 'close to pub' criteria.

How can I build this table\tool so I can utilize it for simple decision making by changing the weight and individual scores as well?

Please include in the answer any formulas and accurate cell references I need to use.

Thank you,
RICUser
F--DOCS-DATA-ZZZ-Weight-and-Rankings.xls

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Richard Obenchain

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

RICuser

ASKER

Thank you for your answer Richard.
As you can tell Excel is not my strong suit but I sense that , thanks to your input, I am really close to achieve what I am trying with this.
Of cours , the example I've given is oversimplified but in essence it is pretty much representative of what my goal is. To be more specific:
In my company we have several solutions (think houses A, B, and C) that we can offer to our clients for accomplishing the same task. HOW we deliver the solution differ and has different cost for the client (hence the different criteria we offer them ). Eventually, the client must select how important each of these criteria is for them (assigning the weight to each) and at the end the result should show them WHY was a specific method selected before another . I am thinking of this like some kind of a decision making tool\decision tree. Often we get questions\complaints from clients questioning us as to WHY was this solution selected and not the other? Our goal is to show them that we took this route based on THEIR selections and the weight THEY themselves assigned to the different criteria.
So, instead of Sarah, mom, and dad , will that solution work with only one column, let's call it CLIENT and House A, B, and C will be Solution A, B, and C etc..? The individual scores for each criteria for each solution (-1, 0, and 1 color coded) is assigned by my team. My confusion from the spreadsheet that you provided comes from teh fact that column "dad" appears twice (the second appearance is as percentages) whereas Sarah and mom columns appear only once. Why is that so and will that work the same way if I remove Sarah and mom columns and leave only one column call "CLIENT" ?
Would you modify your spreadsheet accordingly and re-attach please?
I appreciate your help with this!

Happy Holidays!
RICUser
(see sheet 3 from attached)
Weighted-Rankings.xlsx

RICuser

ASKER

Thank you Richard!

Richard Obenchain

"Dad" appears a second time because it's a drop-down selection (you can change it to Mom, Sarah, or Average).

I've added a third sheet with the changes you requested. I'm not sure this is the most appropriate method for what you're looking to do, but it should work.
F--DOCS-DATA-ZZZ-Weight-and-Rankings.xls