Randomly Select Data From A List

I was asked recently to provide a process that could select patron data from a list randomly. We wanted to select a random portion (20%) of our patrons for a LibQUAL survey. The process needed to be able to randomly select a row of data (a record) for a number of times, determined by the user. In this way it would be possible to randomly select a list of names from the original list...

My solution was to write a Powershell script. The script expects to find a text file called "Possible.txt" in the same directory as the script. The script is run with one argument that is the number of lines to be randomly selected. Once run the script creates a second file called "Selection.txt" which will contain the selected lines of data in the order they were selected.

Links:

• 
  Information for downloading and implementing the Random Selection script.
• Get the script