analyzing existing combinations

Hi, I have a set of transactional data where I want to list all existing combinations and then analyze those combinations in different ways. I've found some things on how to list/count every possible combination but in my case that would not be useful. The number of possible combinations of my data is huge while the number of actual combinations is relatively small. The attached excel file gives an example of how this might work. Imagine there are dozens of classes but only some are being taught and, as the output shows, there are only three actual combinations. An additional complication to this data set is that combinations can include any number of variables. So, in my example a student may be taking one, two, or three classes. I need a solution to be flexible enough to account for any number of classes taken. Thanks in advance for your help.

Hi Essen,

I don't know how excel can list all possible distributions of your course values.
It's computation, so I presume some script in vba can do the trick.
Pivot table can offer some help and the best I could do is this.
Attachment 702365

Probably not enough since it won't consolidate the students with the same course options.

Hi Exl-Noob,

Just to be clear I am not trying to list all possible combinations. I'm only looking to list the actually occurring combinations that can be found in my data. Let's call these the "course builds" in my pretend example. I had trouble downloading your attachment. It doesn't seem to be there. I don't know anything about VBA but I'd be willing to learn if that's the only path to a solution.

Hi JeteMc

Thanks for looking into this. Unfortunately this doesn't quite capture what I need, although it's close. It seems that your solution works with the columns as they are organized in my example with the names appearing in that specific order. However, when I put the names out of order the results are no longer correct. I probably should have made a better example file, sorry. The solution needs to be such that the names can occur randomly in any order and still yield the same result.

Now I understand where you're going with this. That is a really clever solution, JeteMc, and it appears to have worked. One difference that cut down on the calculating time - to build the final schedule I just copied/pasted the second to last build column and ran "remove duplicates." It seems to have produced identical results. Thank you very much for your help! I will mark this solved.