all possible combinations

[TRACEY]

How can I create a list of all possible combinations of a
set of data? ie. all possible combinations of A,B,C are
ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA

 

[DL]

I would say that you would need to code the app you are using, to store yr
data, assuming you cannot do it / wish to do it manually.
Initial thoughts being, you would need to parse through through the data,
collect the number of instances and code accordingly to produce the output
to whatever.
If data is a fixed number of entries it is relatively easy if it is not it
becomes somewhat more complex

 

[garfield-n-odie]

Hi, TRACEY. Excel can do what you suggest with a bit of custom VBA code... at least the solutions I've see are custom because they are specific to the total number of objects and the number of objects per group (e.g., combinations of 2 in a population of 8; the example you gave is permutations of 3 in a population of 3). Statistically speaking, there is a big difference between combinations and permutations... in your example, there is only 1 combination, but there are 6 permutations. You might try posting a specific question in news://microsoft.public.excel.programming.