Hi Michael

From what you say, you are only trying to find out if a customer bought any
one or more items from the range of 10.
If that is the case, then maybe a simple Match would suffice
=IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(A1,D11:D10,0)),"yes","no")

where A1 holds the item number bought and D1:D10 holds the list of 10 items
you are interested in.

Regards

Roger Govier


michaelp wrote:
Good Afternoon,

I have been asked to creat a spreadsheet that show the number of people
that purches a set of itmes. the problem is that the set contains 10
items and they and be purched in any number of ways eg only one item or
the first and third item or all 10 and so on.

I have created a table of all of the possable combinations (1025) og
them and then concatenated the pruches types to link to the buyers
name
eg tom 1,2,3,-,5,6,7,-,-,10 so Tom purched item 1 item 2 Item 3 56710
ect

The number of customers is arount 45,000 and thus my spead sheet is now
20meg in size with all the lookup formulars.

is there a simply way that???


thank you