Conditional border creation for excel based on length of text - excel

Okay so I've spent some time digging through stack overflow other various websites, I'm not even sure this is possible but here's the example.
I have an excel sheet with quite a bit of information, in column A there are various types of information however I specifically only want the cells that have #####-###.
The issue is that the other users will sometimes replace the last 3 digits with question marks and similarly, when adding the dash it doesn't treat it as a number it's considered general format...
Like I said I maybe have the number 60613-555, then right below it part numbers/names etc, so I only want that cell with the project number to have the top line border...

Use this as the rule:
=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("????-???",$A1))
And apply it to the columns desired:

Related

(MS Excel) Do you know a way of putting equation into cells?

I would like to achieve following as my spreadsheet is rather large and I always spend a lot of time figuring out some of my calculations that I made few weeks ago.
Just by looking at the formula, I cannot really say, which equation / correlation was used. Notes such as "this guys" (1967) for "some" ratio < "something" and ___ < "something" are also not as clear as putting equation next to it. If I cannot put it in a cell, it usually gets disarranged. Is there any trick.
Example of what I want to achieve (This was made in Numbers, which are otherwise inferior to MS Excel):
There are various 3rd party 'add-in' providers that you can utilise to assist with this (I used MathType for my MSc dissertation which included over 100 equations in tables etc.).
You can also use this to easily prepare a neatly aligned set of equations in MS Word (where I imagine your table is ultimately going, if not in Latex - although I could be wrong!).
To snap any object to a cell boundary, hold alt whist dragging it with your mouse in MS Excel.
To resize the object ensure you select "lock aspect ratio" to avoid undue distortion (equation objects need extra TLC as an incorrect aspect ratio for your equation can detract from credibility of your overall work!
jOptoins**
Sample
You of course can add a comment or note to the cell by Right-Clicking the cell.
If you want to include a comment in the formula itself...
HTH

Excel - How to split values of 70 items equally into 6 groups

So I'm trying to create an Excel sheet to split the values of 70 items into six groups.
For reference, this is to divide my grandma's estate evenly for her six children. I have approx. 70 items and their appraised values in an Excel sheet, but not sure the best way to go about this. I was hoping to use Solver, but haven't been able to figure it out.
Ideally I could make it so people could pick specific items that they want and run the Excel sheet again to re-balance all the values.
Thanks!
So set this up, based on a thrown together set of values.
Each sumproduct is held to be <= to the (total value / 6)-10. You may want to reduce this to 5 or 2 etc but the smaller you go the harder it is to solve due to the values of the items.
I have done this for 30 items, there is a limit to the number of variables in the Solver - if you hit that then you might consider pairing items, or manually setting some will help, see below.
You might want to add something for sentimental value - I will leave you to consider that.
As for manually setting some items then you can set those items to one, move them to the top or bottom and remove them from the Solver variable cells - that way they won't get changed, but they still need to be included for the value. If the values are similar then they can be taken out if the differences are ignored by the parties.
So, edited the model, see below. Note that 1 item is not allocated. This could be addressed by changing the constraint controlling cells J9:J38 but it comes down to the difficulty of finding an exact solution and that is also why the 10 can be adjusted...

How can I use excel to generate sentences from a multitude of possible options?

Right now I have a list of around 100 manholes, and each manhole has 8 different things that could be wrong with it (defects), each of those has 12 positions that they could be at in the manhole (think positions on a clock).
For example a manhole could have 2 holes and 1 leak at 5, 7, and 11 o'clock in the manhole.
In Excel I have a column for every type of defect that, when the defect column and manhole row match up, if the manhole has that defect, the number of defects is manually entered into that cell. If there are no defects, they are all left blank in that row. Then, the number of defects and type of defect is put into a different cell for formatting, so it looks like this: (2) holes
The numbers up top along withe at, bench, etc, are all for what I use as references when I'm building my sentences. I reference all the cells individually in order to create a sentence that looks something like this:
68409 has (2) Weepers at 2, 3 o'clock in channel and (1) gusher at 3 o'clock on bench
The Italics show what is selected from the sheet. I want Excel to do all the work for me, rather than typing in something like this every time:
=C4&" has "&AB4&$AB$1&AN4&" "&$AC$1&" "&AD1&" and "&AE4&$AB$1&AQ4&$AC$1&" "&AE1
I'm not sure if Excel can help me at all because there are a lot of references and possibilities. I'm not afraid to have to do some of it myself, like making sure the sentence flows well or even put in heights within the manhole (Cause I need to do that too), but if something could get me started, then that would help a lot.
Thanks!
This is how I tell what time each defect is located at:
This is what my sheet looks like:

Prevent hash signs (#) showing up in Excel without changing cell format or width

I have the following Excel VBA code:
Sheet1.Columns.ColumnWidth = 8.14
Sheet1.Rows.EntireRow.RowHeight = Sheet1.Cells(1).Width
Sheet1.Cells.WrapText = True
Sheet1.Cells.NumberFormat = "F0 P0 C0" & vbLf & "00 00 00"
Sheet1.Cells.Value = 123456789
The first two lines make the cells in my sheet perfect squares of 8.14 horizontal points and the following lines intend to make each cell look like this (aka displaying a 9 digit number in visually "separated" sections within the same cell):
F1 P2 C3
45 67 89
The problem is that Excel replaces my number (which should exactly fit into that 8.14 pts sized cell on 2 lines, since it's word-wrapped) with hash signs (#), because of its perceived length - and I don't want that.
Is there a way, through Excel settings or VBA code, to prevent this automated behavior without changing the cell format to 'General' or 'Text' or increasing the cell's width?
Now I've seen this question answered before, but all the answers referred to changing the cell format or size, which I can't do, for a couple of reasons:
this sheet is intented to be a more or less geographical "map", in which each cell is a point on that map, so naturally I need as many "points" as possible displayed in the visible section in Excel. If I make the cells (squares) larger, I can barely fit a 10x4 grid into the visible section, at 100% zoom - since I must double the cell's previous size to a huge 124 pixels, in order for Excel to display my number unaltered
if I change the format to 'Text' (aka String cell values), my Excel file becomes huge (cca. 1MB) and virtually unusable, since the map is around 255x128 "points". 255x128 number formatted cells work blisteringly fast compared to the same amount of 'text'/string formatted cells
if I change the format to 'General' is more or less the same story as above, plus, I can't use custom formats to "separate" my number sections as seen in my example (and yes, this is the intended appearance).
EDIT: While checking http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/forcing-carriage-return-in-custom-date-format/ I found this from a certain Dave (credits to him), which is also the solution to my problem:
If you try to shrink the columnwidth, you’ll notice you’ll see ####’s way before you (or I) think you should. But a slight change can fix this. On the alignment tab of the format cell dialog, turn off wraptext (if it’s on). Turn on “shrink to fit”, then turn on wraptext.
I tried it and it worked! The VBA code for this is equally simple - adding the code below right after my initial code did the trick:
Sheet1.Cells.WrapText = False
Sheet1.Cells.ShrinkToFit = True
Sheet1.Cells.WrapText = True
I didn't want to "cheat" and answer to my own question, so I wrote this as an edit to my original post.

SUM the column in parts and it calculates different to the entire column SUM

If I sum a large column separately in individual sections, and sum those results, it adds up to be slightly different than if I sum the entire column at once.
The value is off by ~ 0.00000000001 - but my conditional formatting picks this up and it is different - despite the fact they are summing the same values.
The formatting of all cells are set to 'Number'.
I can't figure out why or how this would happen - does anyone have some idea? Has something like this happened to you before when working with accurate values?
I found this article on Microsoft's web site. It discusses limitations in Excel's arithmetic and possible ways to deal with them.
I can't imagine that your input numbers have 15 digits of precision, so probably the easiest solution is to round your multiplication/division/etc. results (which I assume you have to get you to the 15 decimal digits).

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