Greetings Excel guru's
you have already helped me twice recently but as fast as I get help I am come up with another idea to make my work more efficient, trouble is I am by no means a master of Excel.

Here is my conundrum. I supply cut pieces of steel of which you have helped me with a cutting price calculator which works a treat. I am now looking to see if excel can calculate how to take a standard 1000mm or 500mm long piece and take various lengths from a list and work out the most efficient way to cut with the minimum waste.
currently I have to do this manually which on some big projects can take some time to do. Also my guys in production can take it upon themselves to cut differently to what I have calculated and then make mistakes which ultimately create waste making us less efficient.

I have attached a copy of a short cutting list, you will see there are various lengths and quantities of each length. I have then manually calculated what I deem the best way to cut.

So can Excel take a list of lengths and work out a cutting list based on 1000mm long pieces being the standard. It is not as straightforward as taking the total mm required and dividing by 1000 it needs to work out the most economical route.

I am unsure if this can be done but in theory it must be able to, it can do better math than I can.

Any help would be most welcome, and any contributor would be duly thanked and kudos added to their profile

thanks in advance.