A small tool to pair gift givers and recipients for Secret Santa
The most current version is gift_picker.py. It's written with only modules from the standard library, so it should be usable on any Python 3.7+ installation. Each version has its own Readme with instructions.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions!
This program only requires python 3.7 or higher. You can check what version of python you have installed
from most terminals with python --version or python3 --version as for some reason system python will still be 2.7 sometimes.
Python can be installed or updated here.
This program takes .csv files, which most spreadsheet editors will be able to download a sheet as. I believe online Excel doesn't have this option, but desktop Excel should. Make sure that you only have one sheet in the file. The column ordering goes:
Nameof the person to give a giftInclusionsor the forced pairings to be madeExclusionsa list of people that this person cannot give a gift to
The column headings are optional. If you do include them, make sure the first one is called name or names the others can be what you want.
The Exclusions list
is just a list of names in the cell with comma-space separation (so Kirk, Spock, Picard). All names need to be unique.
After cloning the repo, change into the repo directory with the cd command; you can run the picker without doing this, but the filepaths to type in
will be more cumbersome. Likewise either move your sheet file into this directory or copy its whole path to use. The program can be run with either:
$ python gift_picker.pythis will bring up a file dialog to select your input file from, and select where you would like the output to go.$ python gift_picker.py <name-of-your-sheet.csv> <new-name-to-write-to.csv>if you want to specify the file paths in the command.
You may need to run it with python3 instead, depending on if there's a python 2 version on your system.
The program has been tested and works, but I'm still adding features.