Bill,

What you said about the amount of numbers was also my concern. Of course
nobody in a good state of mind would like his PC to work day and night for a
week to solve something like that. But it is a challenge (in my point of
view) to make a program that would do the job for, let's say, 20 or 30
numbers.

I supposed that giving the 30 numbers a random sequence, to be refreshed
after each calculation, would be a possibility. I am afraid however that
this is not a really clever idea.

Besides, I do not have the knowledge nor the experience to do it.

Can you or anybody else help?

Jack.

"Bill Martin" schreef in bericht
om...
I guess that it is not possible to find all combinations thet add up to
the
given value? Also not by means of VBA?

It entirely depends how big your column of numbers is. If you have 10
numbers for example, then there are 2^10 = 1024 potential solutions to
exhaustively check. That's a small enough number to do easily with some
programming.

If you have 100 numbers in the column you're looking at a number of
solutions
like 1 followed by 30 zeros. That's a serious problem to try to solve
exhaustively on a PC. Theoretically doable if you devote a PC to it full
time for much longer than you'd be willing to do.

If you have 1000 numbers forget any possibility of an exhaustive search.

With some clever programming you could probably speed up the search for
solutions by a factor of 10 or 100, but that's an insignificant
improvement
for large columns of numbers.


Bill -- (Remove KILLSPAM from my address to use it)