How do I generate all possible unique arrangements of 5 numbers

Are you wanting 2 digit numbers like 35 and 53 or are you wanting 5 digit numbers?

permutations not combinations! eg
123 has 1 combination of 3 but 6 permutations
123
321
132
312
213
231

is it always a series?

this workbook does it but i dont know if it will run on mac 2011

no idea its probably an office 2011 thing works fine in 2007
what did you put in it?

I did this manually.

First, I entered 11111 in A1 and selected A1. I then went to Fill, Series. Select columns, selected Columns and end value of 55555 then OK. This filled column a with all possible numbers of 5 digits that could be formed by the digits 1,2,3,4,5 and also 0,6,7,8,9

I then used Find and one at a time found 0, selected All then deleted all numbers that had a 0. This I repeated for numbers 6, 7, 8, 9 This left me with numbers that only had the digits from 1 to 5.

I selected column A and then the Data tab, Text to columns, Fixed width and set the delimiters between each digit. Clicked finish and this separated the numbers into 5 columns.

I then sorted all the remaining numbers from smallest to largest. I then used the COUNTIF to count the number of 1's 2's 3's, 4's and 5's in each row. =countif($a1:$e1,1) =countif($a1:$e1,2) =countif($a1:$e1,3) =countif($a1:$e1,4) and =countif($a1:$e1,5) in the cells G1:K1 and copied down the length of the data.

Next step was to use in L1 =sum(G1:k1) and copied down the length of the data. All data was selected and sorted on column L. All rows that didn't total 5 were deleted. This left only rows of 5 digits with the digits 1 to 5 with no duplicates. (124 rows)

Using the above for 6 digits, I ended up with 720 6 digit combinations.

slighly different manual method
123456 in cell a1
use series fill columns increment 1 stop value 654321

then in b1
=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"1","2","3","4","5","6"},A1)))=6
double click the fill handle to fill down
copy paste special values over the formulas to remove them
filter on true
copy paste visible rows to new sheet

then text to columns fixed width on that


alternative to copying visible rows is to sort by column b descending
go down to first false in this case it would be a721
click the row number to select the row then ctrl+shift+down arrow to select all the false then delete

i just tried the xlsm i uploaded and i get the same error must be a version thing
try the xls version instead
ITS LIMITED BY ROWS SO THE MOST YOU'LL GET IS 1-8
also attached is 1-5 1-6 1-7 1-8 done also included is the same thing with text
you can use that as a template so say you wanted
12 35 67 89 41
you can find replace each letter with one of those

Hi, Mr MartinWilson and Mr Newdoverman,

Here is the link (sorry, forgot)

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/o...1-522bfe373d25





Best Regards from Miami

David

@ david gonzalez thanks for that link ,replacing that line of code has done the trick for xlsm, good find
ok here is the modified work book
ive remmed out the old code line and added the new

Thanks for the link....interesting!

Thank you for the feedback. It was fun to see an answer slowly take shape one step at a time.