I am posting this to both the regular and the programming group
because I don't know if the solution requires programming. If not,
sorry and ignore this.

Anyway, here is my questions. I have a specific and then a more
general issues. I have a set of data that changes frequently. In
particular, the number of items change. What I want to do is get the
list of unique concatenations of the items. Now that part is easy. I
concatenate the cells. Copy as value. Then make a filter unique. But
that is lots of action on my part. I have to copy the concatenate
formula to a variable number of rows. I have to do the copy and paste
special. And I have to do the filter. Is there someway to make it more
automated? My idea, which may not fit in with excel, would be to have
something that looked in col A and B, concatenated everything as long
as there was something there, and wrote the value to col C. If it
could then filter and write that to D I would be very happy. I am as
interested in the general problem of dealing with variable number of
data items as this specific problem (which is just a sub-set of what I
am doing). I could do it with a DB, but that is much more complex a
problem and has its own issues in my case.

Anyway, TIA.
--
Matt Silberstein

All in all, if I could be any animal, I would want to be
a duck or a goose. They can fly, walk, and swim. Plus,
there there is a certain satisfaction knowing that at the
end of your life you will taste good with an orange sauce
or, in the case of a goose, a chestnut stuffing.