I fancy myself pretty Excell savvy, but this one is a stumper for me. I mean I could do it, but the amount of programming involved would be more work than it’s worth. I’m looking for a more elegant solution. Here’s the issue.
There’s a column of numbers - say 200 entries. You know that a handful of these entries add up to a known number. Is there a way to determine which entries they are?
I am no Excel guru but your issue sounds like it could be handled by the Solver add-in:
Without further limits, this might be hard to solve, since there are 2^200 different sums, which is a 61 digit number in decimal notation. However, if there are some limits on the 200 numbers, it might be easier. For example, if they are all positive, you may not have to examine a large number of possibilities.
I can offer no help solving this within Excel, but it’s probably worth noting that you’re asking about solving a special case of the knapsack problem.