randomly choose cells for a specific input goal budget

[happyandjeffswife]

I'm not sure if Excel can do this, but is there a function for this scenario? Lets say I have 100 line items containing bills that total $50,000, but my budget is $20,000. None of the bills have priority over the others, so it makes no difference to me which ones I delay payment on. I just need a way to randomly choose line items that will get me as close as possible to without going over my $20,000 goal. Is there a way to do that without manually trying different combinations?

[MrShorty]

The Solver add-in should be able to handle a task like that. Usual approach:

1) Add a column/row of 1's and 0's in an adjacent row/column
2) Add a =SUMPRODUCT() function using the bills and this column of 1/0 (https://support.office.com/en-us/art...c-4d2145a2fd2e )
3) Call Solver and tell it to:
a) set target cell -- the cell with the sumproduct() function
b) to a maximum
c) by changing -- the row/column of 1/0
d) subject to the constraint that the target cell is <=50000
e) and subject to the constraint that the by changing cells are binary

[happyandjeffswife]

Awesome. Thank you MrShorty.