# Microsoft Office Application Help - Excel Help forum > Excel Formulas & Functions >  >  Permutation & Combinations

## ashishseth

Hi,

Recently I was tryinig to work on Permutation Combination keys in excel. The problem I was facing was I had a set of 12 characters and I wanted to know how many combinations of 3 letters can be generated and what are they. I tried using PERMUT, CONCATINATE, etc functions but failed. can someone please help me in this.

Problem Example:

A B C D E F G H I J K.

ABC, ABB, ACC, BAA, BAC, BCC, BBB, CAA, CAB, CCC.........????

Regards
Ashish

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## Dav

If as in your example the characters can be reused so AAA is a valid answer, and AAB is different to ABA. The number of permutations is 12 for each character, so 12 x 12 x 12 =1728

Regards

Dav

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## ashishseth

Hi Dav,

Thanks for the reply, I agree that there would be 1728 diffierent options that can be generated, howver my problem is that is there any way / formula in excel which can generate all these options for me. I was trying to struggle it out since last night....

regards
Ashish

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## Dav

in A1 put
=CHAR(65+TRUNC((ROW()-1)/144))

in b1 put
=CHAR(65+MOD(TRUNC((ROW()-1)/12),12))

in C1 put
=CHAR(65+MOD(ROW()-1,12))

then copy these down the 1728 rows

However, you would get quicker answers if you stated what you wanted in your original post. It never contained any suggestion of the need to generate the permutations, if you had you would have had the answer by now

Regards

Dav

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## ashishseth

Thankyou Dav,

It worked.

Regards
Ashish

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