Selecting values that add up to a set amount

[rutledbr]

Here is a long shot questions and one that may related to another Office
applications. I have a worksheet of information that contains volume data for
the number of transacations that originate from each business unit. I am
trying to select configurations of business units where the daily volume of
these units adds up to ~12. My intent is to assign specific units to staff
member to manage incoming work flow. Is there anyway I can do this without
manually selecting units until I hit this magic number?

If I have confused you, please let me know.

Thanks

 

[Douglas J Steele]

Your use of the term "worksheet" implies that you're using Excel.

This newsgroup is for questions about Access, the database product that's
part of Office Professional. You'd be best off asking this in a newsgroup
related to Excel.

 

[John Vinson]

Here is a long shot questions and one that may related to another Office
applications. I have a worksheet of information that contains volume data for
the number of transacations that originate from each business unit. I am
trying to select configurations of business units where the daily volume of
these units adds up to ~12. My intent is to assign specific units to staff
member to manage incoming work flow. Is there anyway I can do this without
manually selecting units until I hit this magic number?

If I have confused you, please let me know.

Thanks

This could be done in Access (linked to your Excel worksheet) but...

It's a good example of the "Satisfiability Problem", a classic
NP-Complete mathematical challenge. There is almost certainly no
"efficient" solution - you must try all possible combinations to see
how they sum, and the size of the problem grows exponentially.

If the number of records per day is not huge, it's just possible - you
could create some very messy Cartesian Join queries to try all the
single units, all pairs of units, all triples of units, etc. But it
won't be efficient and it won't be pretty!

John W. Vinson[MVP]