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Our family loves games. We have lots of board games and enjoy playing them, card games, strategy games and computer games. Recently we have combined the electronic with the board strategy games with playing Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne online. They are not actually named the same thing as the online website which is free has not licensed the real game. But in absence of an alternative, this is a great way to find other players, and in our case occasionally play with family who are over seas.

I posted an article about Permutations in Excel once before, back in 2005. I actually made a mistake in my example, and was corrected by a reader in a comment- thanks MathBoss.

I have since had another reader, Dam ask a question that I am not sure of the answer of. So I am opening it up to you Excel experts out there.

Here is the question as Dan wrote it.

How in Excel can I create ALL permutations of a given data set. for example, imagine 5 columns. Each column has a differnet (sic) number of unique entries. Column 1 can be A, B. Column 2 could be A, B, C, D, E and so on. I want to combine 1 item of each 5 columns and keep doing it until I create all possible combinations. The number of permutations (PERMUT) may be very large so I need to automate this. I'd like to avoid building a macro since I am sick of building them and I like the static spreadsheet challenge more.

Add your answers in the comments.

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