It's not that its such a bad idea, or that no one hasn't made the same
request before. As Dave and Harlan have pointed out - the results are simply
overwhelming - both to the computer trying to do the work and even if we had
a couple of Dave's Quantum Computers (maybe a Quanpac??) to get the work done
virtually instantaneously, the sheer number of possible results to sift
through would overwhen the user.

Sometimes our technology overwhelms us even sooner, in the computer world
things pile up rapidly. Consider the simple Excel worksheet:
Pre-2007, 255*65536 = 16,711,680 cells
put a single character into each of them and it requires 16MB of storage for
the data (not giving consideration to other overhead). An amout of storage
easily dealt with using most of today's computers with =256MB RAM and disk
storage measured in GBs.
Along comes Excel 2007:
65536*1048576 = 68,719,476,736 which is 64GB (at 1024=1K, 1024*1024 = 1M,
1024*1024*1024=1G) so most of today's home computers can't fill an Excel
2007 sheet with one alpha character per cell on a single sheet and hold the
whole thing in memory. Thank goodness for 500GB Hard drives!

"Craig Wargel" wrote:

I have an idea for an Excel Formula that I think could be a big help to any
Excel user that would need to do a reconciliation of any type.

My idea is to take a range of cells and then in the background run a
summation for every combination of cells within that range. The second part
of the formula would be a determined number, the out desired output of the
formula would be any combinations of the range that could be used to derive
the determined number.

The formula would look something like:
=possible(a1:a100,desired#) and the output could be the list of cells that
make up "desired#".

Does anyone know either how to write a formula that can do this or who one
can contact at Microsoft to request such a formula? As I said earlier, this
would be a great help to many in the accounting and bookkeeping field when
trying to reconcile an account.