I think you are right that this is not the most efficient way. I don't know
whether a certain number of the symptoms has to be present. The number of
combinations, I think , is in excess of 300 million but how would you benefit
from a program that tells you that.

I may be totally wrong of course but the way I see it is that you have a
patient that can display up to nine of nine symptoms as you have listed.

If you create a list of your symptoms 1-9 as described.

Then columns as follows.

A1=Patient name, B1=symptom1, C1=symptom3, etc , etc

Using a lookup table you can indicate in each column what symptoms they are
displaying.

In your demographic study you can introduce other columns and thereby break
down groups as required.

Many assumptions here, so ask again if I can rethink this.




--
Russell Dawson
Excel Student

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"Joe Kluck" wrote:

I'm not even sure if this is possible, but if anyone has advice I would
greatly appreciate it.

I'm transcribing information from my study into an Excel Spreadsheet. In my
study, "mental health disorder" is part of my baseline demographics. When
entering the data into the spreadsheet, I would like to assign a number to
each "mental health disorder". However, many patients have various
combinations of these disorders, and I would like to assign one number for
each possible combination, to simplify the data entering process.

From the information I have collected, I was able to categorize the
disorders into 9 categories. Would it be possible to have Excel generate a
list of all possible combinations of these disorders, and then assign a
unique number to each combination?

These are the 9 categories I'm working with:
Anxiety Disorder
Bipolar Disorder
Cognitive Disorder
Depressive Disorder
Mood Disorder
Panic Disorder
Personality Disorder
PTSD
Schizophrenia

Even if this is possible, I'm not sure if it's the most efficient process.
I know I won't have a ridiculous amount of combinations, but having Excel
create the list would save me from manually determining which combinations
are currently present in my study.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!